Anime Review: Erased

Now it's time to really get going on the Winter 2016 anime season with noitaminA's third mystery show in as many seasons. For newcomers to the blog, I tried Ranpo Kitan (loosely based on the works of Edogawa Ranpo) but didn't like the first episode at all and watched The Perfect Insider (based on either a novel or a light novel from the 90s) until the end but got frustrated with both it's philosophy and it's "solution" to the murder mystery (I'm honestly surprised that more people weren't even harsher on that detail). Each of these shows has had greater credentials than the last and so we come to this show, based off of a manga with an excellent reputation and with a strong staff (I enjoyed the director's previous work on Silver Spoon quite a bit) and news that the anime would end concurrently with the manga and have the same ending. That's a promising start!

Erased (Boku Dake ga Inai Machi The Town Where Only I am Missing)

Anime Review: The Perfect Insider

I find it funny that even though the noitaminA timeslot has returned to just one show a season that the past three have all been mysteries, it's just such an odd coincidence! So I tried out this one to see if it was any better than Ranpo Kitan and the answer is yes but not as good as I had first hoped.

The Perfect Insider (Subete ga F ni Naru or Everything Becomes F)

Anime Review: Rokka Braves of the Six Flowers

And now we get to the "this wasn't nearly terrible enough to drop it but boy did it have problems" series from the summer anime season. Just about all of these titles had one big thing in common, they started strong and then slowly started to stagger with different amounts of crashing and burning.

Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers

Book Review: The Agency Book One: A Spy in the House

I might have messed up that title slightly since it's written a little oddly wherever I've seen it but oh well, at least this way it's easy enough to understand what book I'm referring to. I had seen a post on the The Book Smugglers blog recommending the latest volumes a few months ago and decided to go ahead and check out the first book so I could see if I wanted to catch up to this later volume.

The Agency 1: A Spy In The House by Y.S. Lee

Book Review: The Dead Key

This was the second of the free books I got from Amazon as part of my Prime trial membership, if anyone else here is thinking of doing the prime membership I highly recommend doing it so it falls over two calendar months (especially a 15th-15th if you can) so that you at least have the option of getting more than one book from this deal.

The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley

Book Review: Greenglass House

For my final entry in Middle Grade March I return to a familiar author, Kate Milford who also wrote the The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands set of books. As far as I can tell, this book is set in the same world as those two and her novellas (the style of the stories within stories matches up and I haven't seen Milford say it isn't) but this book is standalone so a newcomer can come in easily (or someone like me who really needs to do a massive re-read of this whole collection!).

The Greenglass House by Kate Milford, illustrated by Jamie Zollars

TV Series Review: Elementary (season two)

As readers of this blog already know, back when I started working full time in the spring my watching took a hit and once Agents of SHIELD really picked up I ended up having to put Elementary to the side for a while, even though I had really really enjoyed the first season and this season was just as good. It certainly doesn't help that the only (legal) way I can watch the series online is to do it through CBS's website which only has the last five aired-on-tv episodes and my god the most annoying ads ever. I know some people complain about hulu's ads but here they have four or five commercial breaks and five to seven ads each, all 15-30 seconds long. "So, it's basically just like cable tv then?" Pretty much and it is terrible, please put this show on Netflix streaming so I can recommend it more easily!

Elementary (season two)

Movie Review: The Veronica Mars Movie

When the kickstarter for this movie appeared I was a bit hesitant, I mean sure a movie would be nice but when people pointed out that if the executives said no to the series' creators that there would be no movie no matter how much people pledged, well, that put me off pledging. And by that point even though it was within the first few days the kickstarter was already doing amazingly well so I knew that it was going to be funded regardless of whether or not I kicked something in. Happily the movie did end up happening after all and I made plans to see it as soon as I could, I might've had some problems with the later Veronica Mars seasons but not enough to keep me from giving this a shot!

The Veronica Mars Movie

It's been nine years since Veronica Mars left the town of Neptune behind with all of it's corruption and destructive practices it engrained into her ever since she took up sleuthing after her best friend's murder. She's sworn she'll never go back, and certainly not for her high school's 10 year reunion, but after her old friend and lover Logan calls her asking to clear his name in a murder trial, well, there are some things you can't refuse to do for a friend.

In case people don't remember my reviews of the tv series, since it has been a bit of a while since the last one, while I really enjoyed the first season, it's possibly my favorite bit of a tv series of all time, the second and third season had their ups and downs where I loved parts and really disliked others. This movie was much of the same and while I disagreed with parts of the movie for philosophical reasons (which is fine to a point) there also were parts of the story that just felt weak. A large part of it was that this story is set nine years after the third season, Veronica has spent nine whole years away from Neptune and while we don't see much of that life we don't see anything to suggest that she wasn't reasonably happy. I suppose you could argue that because we don't see much of her life in New York that's supposed to show that's she's unhappy, coupled with how her personal look becomes much more vibrant when she gets back to Neptune, but honestly that felt more like a budget/time constraint to me as well as an economy of storytelling (we all know she's going back to Neptune for this case so why spend a lot of time in Not!Neptune?). Yet the story wants us to believe that she spent nine years on the straight and narrow and then slipped completely back into the role in Neptune in a matter of days and that her personality hasn't changed at all. I think that's also the biggest barrier to entry for a non-fan watching the movie, so much of it is about what the characters have done in the past and how their lives have changed/not changed and that change vs lack of change is also my biggest problem with the movie. 


I actually plan to give this it's own blog post sometime in the upcoming month but, speaking as someone who has left their "hometown" for complicated reasons, that philosophical difference I mentioned earlier is how Veronica comes back to Neptune and really considers staying there again. The town did practically nothing good for her for the 19 years she lived there, and is possibly even more corrupt now, and yet ever cynical Veronica thinks there's a chance she can change it for the better? Perhaps if we weren't told that Veronica "didn't do the private investigator thing anymore" and instead saw that she kept working as PI to help people then it would fit but otherwise I read the movie as Veronica coming to help Logan because it's Logan, not because helping people is what she does. I also was a bit thrown by the fact that every other person is still in Neptune as well, for some characters like Wallace and the 49ers it fit, they never had as many complaints, but then you had characters like Mac who clearly doesn't like Neptune and had the skills to leave but didn't, considering this is nine years later that just didn't make any sense to me. And Weevil's ending was just plain counter-intuitive, especially since I didn't see what the point was story-wise or thematically to do it and went against what I remembered from the series, maybe the idea was to show that while some characters have "grown" (like, erm, Veronica I guess) some have "regressed" but that idea still just barely holds together. Finally, she and Piz have been dating for over nine years now and she's never met his parents? What a convenient and cheap way to build tension....

I have seen at least one person complaining that this movie had too many in-references and jokes for new fans to get into the movie and they made it sound as if this was a grievous error. Let me disagree then, while the hype surrounding the movie is a way to bring in new fans this is a sequel, one that heavily builds upon the three years and beyond of these characters lives. I consider it ludicrous for people to jump into a surprisingly plot heavy story like this cold, although they never did talk about who was the big bad of the first and second seasons so it doesn't spoil the actual conflicts. There were a few times when the references went over my head (like Veronica offers to show Piz's boss her impersonation of him, and apparently that was an actor playing himself there so there's at least one in-joke?) and other times I thought they were brilliant little nods to the fans ("I thought I heard you were in the FBI?" "Maybe in another life"). By and large however I felt like the references were winks and nods to the audiences and not the barrier to entry, that was instead the movie itself.

 I will say that I was a little impressed that the show broke its own setups that it was so fond of using, that Veronica would be close to the truth, investigates more on her own, and it goes downhill worse than you'd believe. For once Veronica was able to get out of this mess on her own and unhurt, although I was surprised by the body count in the movie (there was always a body count in the series too but at least there it was spread over 22 episodes, it's one of the noir stylings I'm not as fond of). And visually/sound-wise the movie was perfectly fine, this has never been a story that needed a really large budget, although the characters really don't look like they're nine years older when they were actors in their 20s trying to portray college students. 


So, to watch or not? If you're a fan I think the answer is clear, you want more of this show so you've probably already seen this and made plans to read/listen to the new book set after the movie as well. If you're not a fan, I think I've already made it clear that watching this movie is dumb but that I do recommend at least part of the series. While not surprised I am still sad that this story just wasn't as tight or sharp and I had hoped it could be, I'm not sure what happened but Veronica Mars a long time ago you used to be good and yet I haven't thought the same lately at all....

TV Series Review: Sherlock (season three)

Goodness it's been a long time since this show started, as the opening credits rolled by I was thinking that way back when this show first aired I had just started dabbling in video but by now I could do a fair recreation of the opening on my own if I put my mind to it (and put in quite a few hours of work that is). Back then barely anyone had heard of this show too and now it's everywhere. Before the first episode aired I was chatting with my mom and she said that they were taping it, my aunt's sister said that they would be watching it when I got home that evening if I wanted to join them, I started watching it while babysitting since my charge was already in bed, and when the parents came back, before the episode ended, they said that they were taping it too! Really, now everyone and their cat is watching the show (no seriously apparently my cat loves it when my mom watches Sherlock since it means he can sit in her lap for a full hour and a half without being moved).

Sherlock (season three)

Manga Review: Bokura no Kiseki

I half remember where I first stumbled across this manga, I could have sworn I was on a thread on Anime News Network, I believe something had just gotten an anime adaptation, and someone said something dismissive about this title so of course I went and looked it up. I checked yesterday though and could not find the thread at all so perhaps I found this one via tumblr as well. Regardless, I looked it up and went ahead and tried out the first chapter expecting, based on the tone of the person who first mentioned it, to dislike it and quit halfway through. After the first chapter though there was a little bit of swearing on my part as I realized that this was exactly the kind of manga I loved, I was hooked, and had next to no hopes that it would ever get licensed, a truly winning combination!

Bokura no Kiseki by Kumeta Natsuo 

The manga title translates as "Our Miracle" but I've never seen anybody actually use it, probably because it's so generic (and I have no idea at this point what the "miracle" is supposed to be, that they've all been reincarnated???).


When he was a kid Harusami Minami told his classmates that he was the reincarnation of a princess from a far off land and unsurprisingly was teased for it mercilessly. By middle school he knows well enough to keep quiet about it and seems to doubt even himself a little bit. But when cornered by bullies he almost unthinkingly uses magic to scare them off and suddenly there's no doubt that everything he remembers, from the people around him to being killed by invaders from his fiancee's country, is completely true. A few years later he's starting high school with a surprisingly tight-knit class and jotting down everything he remembers from his former life in a notebook written in the old language. When a few of his classmates find the book they don't tease him about it, Minami has gotten too good at lying over the years to distract them, but some of them seem confused by it. And later that night when someone starts firing off magic in the school building he finds out why, suddenly his classmates are remembering their past lives as well and they were all connected to Princesse Veronica's life. As everyone begins to sort out who they were and which side they were on the various groups of students all have the same goal, to figure out what happened hundreds of years ago and why they died.


Often I feel bad about writing a long synopsis of a story but considering just how detailed the set-up for this one is this time it feels reasonable. This truly is a story best read in chunks and preferably with a character chart nearby (heck, I even took one from one of the later volumes and added onto it since it wasn't detailed enough!) since there are about five different factions of characters to keep track of, some of whom overlap, and about 20 characters which means 20 in the present day and 20 in the past (plus a few key players from the past who haven't shown up yet that the reader knows of, most notably Veronica's betrothed Prince Eugene). And in case anyone was wondering if they've been reading this right, yes Minami is a guy and Veronica was a girl, both cisgendered and straight, honestly since he's grown up with most of her memories it just doesn't seem to phase him at all (I believe either the series proper or the omakes makes mention of this at least once). 

I actually really like Minami as a main character since he's just a bit more manipulative than normal which keeps things interesting. Admittedly, part of the reason he is manipulative is due to his friends advising hiding that he really is Veronica (which I honestly do agree with from a logical perspective, not just because it makes things more dramatic) but I still find it rather interesting to see that his classmates who knew Veronica (who wasn't that terrifying) completely cave in to his bluffs and think it speaks volumes about how isolated Minami has been if his classmates can't work out that if Minami isn't like this and Veronica wasn't like this then it must clearly be a bluff. This doesn't mean that I think the other characters are dumb however, I'll certainly allow that high emotions and general confusion (unlike Minami whose memories gradually returned over 15 years, and still aren't completely there it seems, all of his classmates had theirs return all at once and are having a hard time reconciling the war with their current situation) account for a lot of the character's freaking out. 

Heck, I like a lot of the character dynamics here. Like I said in the summary, they've all just started high school so some of them have known each other for years and years but a lot of them haven't yet they were shaping up to be a really fun, close-knit class. And then you have characters realizing that their childhood friends were on the opposite side in their past lives which means that they very well could have been fighting and killing each other* and have to work it out. I'll admit that I like the "characters on the opposite sides for reasons they can't control" trope more as I get older but what I really like here is seeing the characters having to choose how they'll let it define each other, especially since some groups were keeping secrets in the past and have to deal with those as well. And the story really does focus on a lot of different characters, lately it's branched out from following just the three main groups (the Zestrains, Moswicks, and the neutral Church) to follow some characters who are forming splinter groups and I just love both how complicated it's become and watching one or two characters in particular navigate and manipulate their way through because they don't know that much which in my eyes makes them even more relatable. All of the characters that the story has focused on thus far feel like real, fleshed out characters with a lot of different emotions and goals right now since they are so rounded I can't fault the story for not focusing on every character (although I do wonder if there will be an important reason later on why some of them, namely a few servants on both sides, were also reincarnated).

So what exactly is the plot some people might be asking by now, especially since that's what I usually talk about first about a story. Well, in short the characters have two goals; one that everybody shares is trying to figure out how they all died and putting together what everyone remembers (since even the Moswicks, where the attackers came from, have said that they don't know anything and given that the story shows their points of view I'm inclined to believe them). Minami's group, and the Church as well to a lesser extent, is also trying to figure out who was attacking people with magic that first night in the school since at this point it's clear that this person is a key player in the current day plot and probably the story of the past as well. I have my own theories on who it might be (since again, there are two key players and one moderately important one still missing, although the story has all but confirmed one of them is present this has become more complicated) but I'm sure that no matter how it turns out that it'll be interesting. I'm slightly torn on the pacing of the story again, the chapters are long (I think the magazine it runs in is published every two months) so a lot happens but the story so far, at 8 volumes, has all happened within the span of a month I believe which does stretch my suspension of disbelief a bit. Then again, as I already mentioned, add together teenagers, sudden intense memories about how you were just attacked and dying, plus the realization that you have no idea whose telling the truth and whose lying around you, yes I can see why a lot is going on at the same time. 


As for licensing, well, I'm not that optimistic here. The publisher is Ichijinsha (and it looks like the magazine is a spin off of Comic Zero-Sum, of course that's why I liked it!) so no publisher except Kodansha is restricted from it but I don't know how well it really fits with any of the current manga publishers. Someone asked Seven Seas about it on tumblr and it sounds like the fact that it's already 8 volumes long has them hesitant (I don't see it ending in under 12 volumes myself, under 20 but maybe more like 12-16, but that's just going by how the plot currently feels to me and the scanlations seem to be behind by at least a few chapters if not an entire volume). The manga-ka hasn't had anything published over here before, looks like she hasn't done much except a shorter series or two and contributed to a few anthologies, so that's nothing to worry about here but it's always good to check. And aside from the size, this is older shojo (not precisely josei but rather close to the line), fantasy, not much romance going on (since with how messy everything has gotten people are a bit turned off by romance for the moment), and it has some kinda-complicated politicking in it. I would love to be wrong about all of this and have it picked up but as it currently stands I guess this is another manga which I need to plan on importing for myself someday.




*admittedly it's unlikely that they managed to kill each because of one detail, that you had to be killed by magic to be reincarnated, although a large chunk of the characters were magic users. And that detail actually makes the story even more interesting, how did all of these characters die by magic, especially some that were nowhere near Veronica's castle when the hostilities go down? It seems that everyone's memories get hazier right before their deaths so no one knows, Minami actually realizes that what he thought were Veronica's last moments in fact weren't and unsurprisingly it looks like her last few moments were rather important ones.

Manga Review: Dark Fable of the Forest

Another Emanga title, I would say I was trying to get to some of the more dark fantasy/horror ones right around Halloween but since this one is a fantasy shojo title to start with it was already fairly high on my reading list. Too bad for me it ended up being more gothic than fantasy since I've never been a big fan of gothic works.

Dark Fable of the Forest by Yuriko Matsukawa

Summary: Alyssa is an American college student who is interning at a mystery magazine where 90% of the stories they investigate turn out to be bunk. However, that means that the last 10% are real and Alyssa's goal is to investigate those 10%. Although, just because you know a mystery is real doesn't mean you understand it at first, or that it wants to be understood at all.

The Good: I have to admit I like how the story set itself up as acknowledging that most supernatural mysteries out there are fake, even if all the stories it investigated turned out to be true, since it was just enough world building for the story to feel grounded and in a supernatural story you have to let the audience know what's possible and what's not or else it will feel like the writer just doesn't care about their story. While it was a bit unexpected I was happy that I got to review a full story again, even if the pacing was a bit shaky so it was a little hard to tell that the story was going to wrap up in just two volumes. 

The Bad: Not exactly a fault of e-manga but I wasn't able to download the first volume my normal way, as a PDF, so I had to do some kind of special download for the iPhone in an odd format and I really don't recommend it. I can't recall what the exact name of the format was but it didn't scale as nicely and turned the pages the wrong way, thank god emanga puts a link on all of their "Stop! You're reading the wrong way!" pages so you can skip to the real beginning, just download it as a PDF if you plan to read it on your phone guys. As for the actual story, it felt a little choppy to me, as if the manga-ka originally planned for it to be a longer, more episodic series and then decided to turn the first arc into the main one of the story. That could have just been a miss-impression on my part, feeling like the story didn't fit since I expected something else, but something about it didn't just click for me. I wasn't a fan of the fact that one character vanishes and another who looks just like them takes their place, since it wasn't even used for a romantic plot point I can't figure out for the life of me why the manga-ka did that (could she not think of a different character design?). The other characters weren't much more distinctive, some felt more like a collection of tropes than anything else and really everything just felt a bit bland. The story was nothing new, the characters weren't new, I just couldn't get excited about any of it and when the endgame is finally revealed I more or less rolled my eyes that another cliche had been introduced and wondered how much longer until the end.

The Art: Yep this is 1990s shojo alright. We have the impossibly long faces, somewhat shaggy hair on everyone, and what I think of as odd fashion. One thing that did catch my eye however was just how full each page was, not that each panel was especially detailed but there are a lot of panels on each page and practically none of them had plain white backgrounds. Sure some of them only had a prop or maybe some reaction lines or screentones in the background but it never felt like the manga-ka/their assistants got lazy and didn't fill it in*.



Sorry for the short, delayed review folks, a combination of real life stress (the same stress that has me going to a reduced blogging schedule) and a really persistent head cold kept delaying this. Well, that and as you can tell, this was just so bland that in the end there's not much to say. I'm not a big fan of gothic stories to start with and this story just wasn't interesting to me at all. For fans of gothic sort-of-romances however both volumes are available on emanga.com and other online retailers and there is no print version as of this time.


*although I do keep meaning to pull a whole bunch of shojo manga from the past four decades and compare the usage of white space vs screentones, I feel like this is actually another stylistic choice which dates rather clearly.....

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season three)

So I have finally gotten through all three existing seasons of Veronica Mars, huzzah! By this point there's not much I can say to introduce it (either than "this is a show, if you haven't seen the first two seasons then don't watch this one because that would be just silly) so let's get straight to the review!


Veronica Mars (season three)

Summary: Veronica has survived high school, made it to college, aaaaand she's still in Neptune, which by this point has so much crime going on that the entire town should be on the FBI's watch list. She and her friends stumble their way through college trying both to pass class and to get involved in as few criminal schemes as they can along the way. 

The Good: This season eschews the previous format of having one long, underlying mystery stacked underneath a lot of small mysteries and I actually like this format a bit more. The original format worked well in the first season but in the second season it was starting to work less well, here we manage to have a nice balance of complex mysteries without being so complex that it strains credibility that someone could have committed such a crime that only Veronica was able to solve. And I'm not going to deny that I still enjoy a lot of this series despite it's problems, the problems are often thornier than they first appear and Veronica's snarking makes everything more fun, too bad it couldn't solve all the problems this season had.

The Bad: I had a lot of problems with both this season and with the series as a whole so let's start with this particular season's problems first. To start with, back in the second season Veronica was on Heart College's campus for a couple of days to look around and solved a plot about a serial rapist which I felt like was handled okay. For some unknown reason the writers decided to try and then expand on this plot, as if this was round two, and it was terrible. The college reacts totally differently this time around (which doesn't make much sense), the overall resolution was a bit murky so I'm not exactly sure what happened (I think two things actually did and the show didn't make clear which events belonged to which event), and straw feminists. To elaborate, there are a bunch of really gung-ho, "men suck!" "feminists" in the story and I always abhor this portrayal of feminists, they're such a small minority of the group and that's not what feminism really is, it's about achieving equality for both sexes with the name deriving from the fact that it's almost always the women who have the shorter end of the stick in gender related instances. So any story that involves that particular trope is going to irk me and the way it just dragged on and on here didn't help, neither did the fact that Parker (a character who was introduced during this arc) changed so much between just a few episodes that at first I thought she was a different character altogether, now I just think that the writers completely rewrote her and hoped no one would notice. I'm still on the fence about how I feel about Veronica's love life, the story decided to change everything up rather close to the end and I wish they had started that a bit sooner, it feels odd to see the beginning of a new relationship and not the rest. Speaking of seeing one part of the story but not the rest, I'm still confused on what was going on in the first episode, I know it had something to do with a plot line that was started in the last five minutes of the second season and it was never explained well enough. I don't know if they knew while writing the later episodes here that the third season would be the series last or not, if not that would explain why the series ended on one of it's traditional cliff-hanger season endings but that doesn't make me feel any happier about it. Finally, related to that finale, after three seasons (meaning three years in universe) I'm frustrated with Veronica's overall lack of character development and to some extent the lack of development in some of the extended cast as well. We're still seeing Veronica get into an amazing amount of crap (the running theme throughout the entire show seems to be that the most dangerous situations often don't start out that way), heck at this point I'm wondering why she hasn't taken some martial arts considering how often she gets into physical struggles/fights, and she doesn't seem to have made any progress on her numerous trust issues despite the fact that she's had enough experiences over these three years for her to have made a start. That's part of the reason I'm frustrated that the romance that started late in the season started so late, that one had a chance of really giving her a reason to trust and change which is something she desperately needs by now. I was okay in the first two seasons of Veronica still being this prickly, more of a loner type of character but by this point there should have been a change and I'm frustrated it didn't happen.

Production Values: Nothing really to see here, nothing looked off setting, clothing, or lighting wise and there was no use of CGI as far as I can remember so I don't have anything to say. Well, I do prefer the original version of the song used in the opening credits versus the remix they used this time around but it's not like that was terrible, just not to my taste.



So, in the end I give this season a 2.5 out of 5, weaker than the other seasons and the fact that it's the last, and therefore highlights that none of the characters got to go through the full character arc they needed (except perhaps Wallace who was rounded out nicely in the second season). Heck, from what I've heard the fourth season would have involved a timeskip where Veronica now work for the FBI and infiltrates schools which sounds like a terrible idea to me so I am rather glad that story didn't get made (and probably wouldn't have helped with either the cliffhangers this season ended on or with that pesky character arc she needs to advance in). So, say you still haven't seen any of this series and are now a bit scared, should you watch Veronica Mars at all? I say yes, the first season really was great and if you finish that and are raring to go for more great, watch the second season and then read a summary of the third season unless, like me, your a completionist who just has to watch that. And if you watch the first season and feel satisfied with it awesome, just go to wikipedia to read how Lily's murder case finishes and you're good to go. Do I plan on seeing the movie? Sure, I didn't pledge to the kickstarter (for a couple of different reasons) but unless everyone says the movie is terrible I plan on seeing it (and might still see it anyway, I did just watch this third season after all) and I'm crossing my fingers that it's great.

TV Series Review: Elementary

I have to admit, I'm really curious what must have been in the water a few years back when writers suddenly started going "you know what we haven't had in a while? SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, we should make some!" I suspect that stuff like this is actually part of a cycle, which would also explain weird coincidences like having multiple films in one year based on a certain fairy tale that hasn't been on the silver screen in a number of years, although that didn't make me any less leary when it was announced that there was going to be another tv show based off of Sherlock Holmes, set in the US, and they were making Watson female ("oh great, romance ahoooooy!"). I did change my feelings a tiny bit when I heard that an Asian-American actress had been cast as Joan Watson, the fact that a show was willing to give a non-white actor a leading role gave me some hope that they actually knew what they were doing, and then the first episode leaked and tumblr adored it. Well, not some of the Sherlock fans, but a lot of people did and that sealed the deal, I was going to give this a chance after all and pray that it turned out amazing.


Elementary

Summary: Joan Watson is a sober companion in NYC who helps recovering addicts transistion back into everyday life and her latest client is a British man who is recovering from a heroin addiction, Sherlock Holmes. He's less than thrilled about having a sober companion especially since he's already come up with his own plan for how to transition back into everyday life and stay focused, by working as a consulting detective for the NYPD which means that Joan needs to tag along and in the process discovers that she has a talent for noticing the details and fitting them into the larger puzzle as well.

The Good: Well to cut to the chase, I loved this show. It completely avoided the biggest thing I was worried about, changing Watson to a woman in order to have a romance with Holmes, entirely and instead we got a really good series with a mixed gender leading couple that weren't a couple at all, I liked that! Plus it had a fairy diverse cast of returning characters AND even though things such as prostitution came up several times none of the characters ever made "prostitution is WRONG" comments, the characters just dealt with the cases making it one of the least problematic things I've seen in a long time. The show also managed to have a small overarching story that set everything in motion and ended the story but at the heart of the story it was about Sherlock and Joan and how the two of them grow which was pretty amazing. This is one of the most human versions of Sherlock I've seen, even if he makes a lot of misteps by the end he's apologizing when he realizes, or has it pointed out to him, what he's done wrong and from the first episode Joan is not afraid to call him out on it. Also, I think this is the first time I've seen a Sherlock Holmes story where Watson goes beyond being the audience's point of view character and rises to become a detective themselves, something that amazes me because it's so obvious in retrospect. It was a rather pleasant surprise to see that this series wasn't just about Sherlock getting over his addiction and becoming a better person at the same time but that it was also about Joan moving farther away from her own past and finding something she really took pleasure in.

The Bad: I am a little worried about what the series will do next, if it had ended her I think it would have had a perfectly fine ending and as such I wonder how they'll make the characters continue to change. I saw a snippet of an interview, I think with Lucy Lui (Joan) who said that they were trying/hoping to do more multi-parters in the second season which would be a great idea but I'm also worried that now that the show has proven to be successful more people will try to meddle with it (since I'm told that's what happens with successful shows, everyone wants a finger in the pie and then too many cooks ruin a good stew after all). But, even after being burned by Once Upon A Time's second season I'm going to remain optimistic that the show will continue to be as good and won't simply cover the same ideas over again.

The Audio/Visuals: This being a series that is a procedural crime drama in current day NYC means that there wasn't a lot that could go wrong with the look or sound of this show so I had no problems there. Although again, the show is so contemporary that as long as nothing looked like something I could never, ever theoretically see in the US I wasn't going to have a problem and nothing came even close to that.


So, giving this 4 out of 5 stars and heck yes I'm watching the second season. Unfortunately it's only sort of streaming online, much like certain deals on hulu, CBS only streams the last four episodes (to air) on their site (and none on hulu at all) so at this point I would recommend that people sit tight and hope that it shows up on Netflix soon. Heck, as soon as it does I am shoving several people I know to that page and having them watch it immediately, fingers crossed that this happens sooner rather than later.

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season two)

Through some careful planning I managed to watch the entire second season of Veronica Mars courtesy of the college library I used this past summer for it, although sadly my library has changed their website around so I don't think I can use the inter-library loan system to check out the final season now instead of waiting until May or so. It would just be too easy if I could watch shows that have been out for years and years over a streaming service right?


Veronica Mars Season Two

Summary: It's the beginning of Veronica's senior year and after all of the crazy events of the past year she's put her private work aside. Well, for the time, in a town like Neptune there is always something going on, and usually multiple somethings, so it's only a matter of time before she's back and digging into the seedy underbelly of this messed up town and discovering things that shouldn't even be there.

The Good: More character development for the returning cast which is always a nice thing, although I do feel like Veronica's character arc was rather similar to the one in the first season. Logan, Wallace, and Jackie go through the most but even the smaller characters get a little more fleshed out.  This season was a lot like the first season so this time around it was the details that I appreciated more, like how the show never shames any of it's (teenaged) characters for having sex and never victim blames any of the characters who were raped (although, in browsing the tvtropes page, I'm afraid that one might change next season, crud). And overall I found this season as interesting and engaging as the first season and it even made me realize stuff about my own high school years that I hadn't thought about before. 

The Bad: So at the end of the first season I was so confused if my disc was missing an episode or not that I went to wikipedia and accidentally spoiled myself on the conclusion of the Lily Kane murder trial and I thought "well, at least that won't take too long right?" Nope, it takes them until the end of this season as well to wrap it up and frankly while trials can take a long time in real life they really should've made that one move more speedily. The show also didn't feel quite as tight by the end, looking back on it it had even more large, over-arching plots than the first season did and, even though the show does a pretty good job getting me to suspend my disbelief 90% of the time, some things just got too contrived (one of those things was executive meddling however I've learned) or didn't get addressed as much as it should've. Also, something that's almost a quibble but not quite, it did bug me that the only other girl to appear in the main credits/on the box (Jackie) was someone who spent the first half of the show being an ass and whose personality was almost exclusively defined by her romantic relationship to Wallace (and it sounds like she doesn't come back for the third season, great). She does get much better by the end but I do wish this show had more female characters, it breaks the Bechdal test easily    

The Audio: Nothing really to speak of here, the show keeps the opening and ending themes from the first season, Veronica still has some voice overs and none of the background music really stood out to me so I don't think they added anything to the soundtrack either. Next!

The Visuals: Well, to be honest, there isn't really anything to comment on here. The show  didn't have all the flashbacks/encounters with Lily and they didn't try any tricky camera work or strange filters. The show doesn't really need it now that the supernatural element is gone so as long as everything looks consistent.


Thinking about it I don't think I liked this season quite as much as the first season but I still really enjoyed it, although I'm bracing for disappointment with the third season since I heard that not everything was answered by the end there.

Manhwa Review: Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries Volume 1

Now here's a title I wasn't expecting to talk about today, somehow (I think I saw it as an ad on a webcomic) I found a website that Seven Seas had set up where they were going to upload a few pages each week of this book until it's release and I read along and enjoyed it quite well (although I just found out that they only had license to have it up as a webcomic for a year and that expired earlier in the month). However I thought they were missing the last chapter/half a chapter since A) the page count number didn't match up and B) it was a rather awkward place to end since the criminal had been identified but not caught (and I wasn't going to review just part of a volume). Today however I was in a bookstore and caught site of the book so I decided to see how much was left and I discovered that in fact the entire first volume had been published online, the remaining pages were devoted to a one-shot. So this is now totally fair game for me to review, good thing since I was really wondering how to classify this one and when I'd get around to it otherwise.

Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries Volume 1 story by Hey-Jin Jeon and art by Kiha Lee

Summary: Elizabeth "Lizzie" Newton is a young lady who is more interested in writing her mystery stories (which she's become rather well known for) than dealing with some of her more tedious social duties but when she stumbles upon a crime scene during one of these events she can't help but investigate a bit herself. There she discovers that what looks like a simple suicide is in fact a murder and drags her fiancee Edwin into her investigation to solve what the police don't even know is there. 

The Good: While you can't exactly figure out the mystery yourself from all the clues (something which happens very rarely for me in any mystery regardless of medium however) the characters are rather meticulous explaining the details later so it feels like a well-thought out mystery that's complicated enough to remain unnoticed if you're not looking for a mystery but still within the range of what a clever person could solve. Lizzie is a spunky heroine and, while not highly original, is likable enough and her banter with Edwin worked well (although the story dropped a few hints that there's more to him than we/Lizzie know and I just hope the story won't take forever to address that). It's a first volume so it's rough around the edges at parts but it's completely grabbed me and I would quite like to read more and see where the series ends up going.  

The Bad: As alluded to earlier, this volume ends in a really awkward place and has the page room for more story and I much would have rather had this story completely wrapped up in one volume. Unless the story was just a bit too long for one volume and they decided to delay it to stretch over two volumes instead of having it carry over just a bit and then start a new story, that would actually make sense. That is my biggest complaint and, well, an unsatisfying ending is a rather large complaint especially with the two volumes (I don't know if the second one is the finale or if the series is on-going) being published six months apart. Pretty much everything else that can be called a flaw (not yet rounded characters, character interaction also comes off as a bit flat at times) can be easily explained by the fact that this is a first volume, it's a really solid first installment all things considered.

The Art: Ms. Silverman on ANN has already talked about the details in the art with more authority than I have so go read her review for that and I'll just talk more generally. And the art is pleasant, I was actually surprised to hear that this was a manhwa because previously the art I've seen from manhwa has been much more stylized (in different ways though) and this just looked like a webcomic that has more shojo roots than some.


So I give this 4 stars out of 5 and fully plan on buying this and the next volume when I get a chance, especially since it looks like this is the end of the free preview on the site (which makes sense since it was more than generous, just wish there had been a little note saying "End of Volume 1" somewhere) 

Book Review: Unspoken

Sorry this is late everyone, basically the last week of November has turned into "No Sleep November " (okay there is sleep, just never enough) because of all the projects I have which are more important than this and, sadly, involve less effort/creativity/focus than putting together a review does. So there are likely going to be weird outages/delays over here until around the 14th when I'm done, blaurgh.

SO, this was one of the books I was most looking forward to in 2012 based on the excerpts (and the two short prequels I read, names and places to find them escape at the moment, one of which could actually be considered a spoiler, I hadn't expected something there to have been revealed until much later, clearly SRB gets the idea of  "expect your readers will figure out the plot twists and don't wait until much later to reveal them") and was quite happy that I didn't have to wait months and months to get a hold of it. 

Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan

Summary: While most people consider Sorry-in-the-Vale to be your typical, quiet English hamlet Kami is convinced that there are mysteries that lurk below the surface. After all, the town has an absent, powerful family of whom the rest of the town only speaks of in whispers and there has to be a reason for that. But the Lynburns are about to suddenly return and soon enough Kami will have a chance to find out how right or wrong she is. That is, if anyone can take her seriously, she is the girl after all who runs around telling people about her imaginary friend from America.

The Good: SRB has said that Veronica Mars (the character from the show of the same name) was an inspiration here and I can see it easily. Kami is in no way a copy of Veronica, and different in some ways, but they are cut from the same cloth of adventurous, brash, clever, and all around fun to watch teen sleuths and I really liked her (even though it took a little while to stop wincing at her name). The other characters were great too, one complaint I have about a lot of fiction is how the main character has only one or two close friends (one or both of which will double as love interests) which generally isn't how real life is and here Kami has a whole posse of people who get fleshed out and I really liked reading about them as well and can't wait to read about all of them in the next book.

The Bad: Apparently a good part of the internet raged over the ending, once you get about half way through and know that fact then you can easily guess what happens, and I am frustrated but not for nearly the same reason most people are. I feel like a character made a sudden, 180 degree change in character either to move the plot forward or did it as a ploy to keep other characters safe, even though everyone has been working together up until that point. I imagine that there will be an explanation in the next installment but it still feels rather forced to me. 


There's not much else for me to say except yes, I really enjoyed this book, plan on buying a copy (I got an ARC from Random Buzzers and I entered a number of contests before to try and get a copy) and I may or may not have already shoved this book at one of my step-sisters (along with Book of Blood and Shadows) and am eagerly awaiting her verdict on it....

Anime Review: Hyouka

Hyouka was my late spring pick-up, partially because it was subtitled and partially because, well, I like big mysteries and this show said straight up that it was only going to focus on smaller, "everyday" mysteries and frankly Dusk Maiden of Amnesia seemed like a more interesting choice there. But, funny enough a situation that has happened to me several times with the same result, I was bored, had a lot of sewing to do and needed something to watch so I sat through the first few episodes and, after a couple of episodes of not liking the characters, something happened, the characters started to grow on me. And that is the series' strength, it's an absolutely fantastic character-driven show which did so much with a shorter than usual run time.

Hyouka

Summary: Houtarou Oreki is a high-schooler whose motto in life is "if I don't have to do it then I won't" which sums up his entire mindset of doing as little as possible in order to conserve energy. So he decides it's not worth the energy to defy his sister when she asks if he could please join the Classics Club at school, the same club she was in that's about to be disbanded since there are no members left. Figuring that no one else will be there and he can use it as a place to nap Oreki agrees, only to find out that his friend from middle school (Satoshi), his friend Mayaka, and their energetic classmate Eru Chitanda have also joined. It's too late for Oreki to back down however and he is soon dragged all over the place to help Chitanda satisfy her enormous curiosity with the small mysteries of life (and alarmingly for him he seems to be rather good at it as well).

The Good: The show, based on some Japanese novels (NOT light novels which does explain a few things) has three major arcs with a number of one episode stories between them and, while some of the stories are connected together, it's not a plot heavy show in the slightest, what connects everything together in the end are the characters and their development. And holy cow was there development, each of the four characters had at least some and the effects of it could clearly be seen in later episodes, something that impressed me since none of the characters completely change but rather begin to in the way that teenagers do. Normally I don't say this but there is an OVA from one of the DVDs, numbered 11.5, and while it's not a great mystery (IMO the weakest of the series) it's a good idea to watch it between episodes 11 and 12 since it cements the character development Oreki is going through and also shows how the dynamics of the group have begun to change, they really are a group of friends by that point which wasn't how they started. Once the show has hit it's groove (which is a bit before that part) it's just fun to watch the characters interact, how they think, and the show isn't afraid to poke fun at itself, the rest of the club knows exactly what they're getting into whenever Chitanda hears of a new, strange incident and Oreki even spends an entire episode coming up with the most outlandish theory he can to try and get her to stop taking all his theories so seriously. The fact that I can say that this episode was mostly about two characters talking to each other and it was fun shows just how strong the writing is, kudos to both the original writer and the script adaptor(s?) for pulling off such interesting yet ultimately realistic characters*.

The Bad: The story was smart by choosing to put it's most "serious" arc first in order to draw in viewers since this show does have a really slow start. It took about four episodes for me to get into it and a few more before I started really looking forward to it. While the characters aren't exactly unlikable in the beginning they aren't really likable either, it takes those first few episodes for the story to hint that these characters aren't static which is what ended up drawing me in. With many shows I can say "if you like such and such episode you'll like the rest of the series" since by that point the show has found it's groove and will continue along the same way. While Hyouka does settle down quite quickly the best parts of the series, the parts that made myself and many other fans fall for it, don't occur until around the middle of the show, there's a bit of a slump between the first and second major arcs which I'm afraid might make people dismiss the show and I really don't know what to say there. The show doesn't end on a big arc, rather it ends on a number of small ones which allow for Chitanda's character development to fully come into play, so you need to be able to like both the small stories and the big ones and be able to sit through rather deliberate pacing for both. Other than the slow beginning I can't even call that a weakness of the show, it's simply a work that requires commitment and if people like character-driven fiction I think it will pay off in the end (although personally I would have liked the story to end on an arc instead of a collection of side stories but that's just personal preference on my part). 

The Audio: Apparently this show used a LOT of big-name seiyuu for minor character roles but, since I recognize maybe seven Japanese voice actors on a regular basis, I didn't really care about that. I did think that the voices for the main quartet worked out pretty well (although Chitanda could be a bit shrill at times) and both sets of opening and ending themes worked well (even though for the first few episodes I was confused if the show even had an OP, I don't recall if it just wasn't played the first couple of episodes or if it just took a while to sink in since I can recall it just fine now). My favorite of the group was the second ending theme which I'll admit was more because of the visuals but it's a catchy song regardless (the second opening has equally catchy, although completely different, visuals to accompany it). Finally, one thing that impressed me on the very first episode of this show was the foley, they actually made an effort to add in this little background sounds of life (like crosswalks that beep), much like they did with the visuals, and those little details really caught my attention in a good way and I wish that other slice of life shows would go to the same effort to make their settings real.

The Visuals: Studio Kyoto Animation is known for having the large budget needed to make a good looking show and wow was this show amazing to see. While the character designs are certainly anime-ish the backgrounds weren't and they loved throwing in photo realistic props as well. A number of the shots, especially in some of the earlier episodes, reminded me of how a truly great photographer can make any old mundane thing look fascinating , finding the beauty in the ordinary I suppose, since even an empty coffee cup looked good on this show. Not that everything was in that art style, each time Oreki had to explain a mystery the art style would change (sometimes to some rather odd choices, ones that always ended up working I'll note) which was a brilliant way to keep the show from being merely a bunch of talking heads. The characters also seemed to be animated a little better than usual, I noticed more facial expressions and body language here which was great (and hilarious during the second arc which involved a student film) and also added to the show. Often I feel like that the lack of that kind of subtly is a weakness of animation, I've seen a few shows (Steins;Gate comes to mind) where the voice actors are putting out amazing, emotional performances yet the characters on-screen aren't emoting at all which takes away from it. Here that was never a problem and for a show that depends on it's characters so much it was a real blessing.


In short, it took a while but I eventually fell head over heels for this show and goddammit it's not licensed or streaming anywhere currently. I can't imagine it'll stay unlicensed forever (worst comes to worst I will import this from Australia or the UK, PAL to NTSC conversions and region locking be damned) but it does make it a little harder for me to recommend the show since I know there's no way to support the creators while watching it. So if this interests you but you have other things to watch now, just hold off a bit and see if this situation changes. If it interests you and you want to watch something in the gap between seasons/nothing from the fall season has caught your eye (I don't think there are any mysteries lined-up for the fall, although this show really isn't about the mysteries) then yes, watch it and hopefully marathoning it will make it work a bit better than watching it week by week. 



*I'll admit it, Oreki's inner monologue is about as snarky as mine usually is which did mean I started sympathizing with him pretty on in the series. Your milage may vary there, and it's not like there haven't been snarky characters in anime before, but his observations and comments felt less like what a "character" would say and more of what an, admittedly mature, high schooler would. 

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season one)

I had my way I would've started watching this show right after Life on Mars just for the fact that both shows have "Mars" in the title but sadly neither my school library nor Netflix streaming had the show available for me. But the college library near my home did so I spent all summer watching the show bit by bit (curse their two-dvds-at-a-time limit) and wow do I wish I had watched this show years ago.

Veronica Mars (season one)

Summary: In the town of Neptune there are only two kinds of people, the millionares and the people who work for them. Well, and Veronica Mars, daughter of the town's sheriff which gave her an in with the popular crowd, until her boyfriend dumped her, his sister/her best friend was murdered, and her dad was driven out of office by going after their father and he rallied the town against them. Now Veronica is stuck between those two worlds and instead of being on the pep squad she now assists her dad with his private detective business while she takes on cases of her own from classmates on the side. But recently some new things about her friend Lily's murder have come to light, among others things, and Veronica is finding out that her town has even more secrets that she would have bargained for.

The Good: This show does an amazing number of things right, from the balance of when Veronica is at school and when she's out (I've seen so many stories forget that high school students are, you know, in school for almost 40 hours a week), broke plenty of stereotypes and tropes all over the place and made the show feel a hell of a lot more realistic that way (from the cult one to the episode involving a substitute newspaper teacher). Veronica is an interesting, I'd even say  likable, character but it's very obvious that she's already broken by the time the series starts and that she's trying to figure out how to put herself back together, which I personally prefer to a story that spends more time breaking it's characters than putting them back together. The other reoccurring characters were surprisingly well fleshed out, there are adults who don't stay on the sidelines in order to let the younger characters tell a story, Lily's death has affected over half the cast (one or two of which might be even more broken than Veronica) and Lily herself ends up being very well fleshed out for being, well, dead before the story even began. The show also does a very good job at weaving in details about the overarching mystery in the smaller cases Veronica and her dad take on and it all ties itself together in the end very well.

The Bad: Since this caught me really off-guard I'll say it up front, the ending to this season is a bit abrupt in places and, according to wikipedia (I was convinced something was wrong with my disc so I had to look things up) the remaining threads will be wrapped up in the next season. So while everything comes together, what's revealed in the final episode isn't itself wrapped up (and for once I was mistaken about the episode count so the show was even able to catch me off guard with the ending). That's my only real complaint about the series, since Veronica will still be in high school in the next season there's more than a chance that various side characters will show up again and get more character development (I was confused why wikipedia listed Mac as a main character when she didn't have a lot of screen time compared to many other characters), overall the show made very good use of it's runtime when it came to developing characters. 

The Audio: The show's catchy opening theme is actually the shortened version of an already existing song "We Used to be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols which surprised me, the lyrics fit the show so well ("we used to be friends/a long time ago") that I had assumed it was created specifically for the opening. The rest of the music didn't stand out to be as much, although I did like the music used in the ending credits as well, but given how catchy this opening is I think I can be excused.

The Visuals: The actors do look a bit old to be highschool students but only people who are around high school students on a regular basis are going to notice that, I didn't until I saw someone who looked very similar to Lily Kane and realized that she was technically older than Lily is in the show yet looked much younger.

I could have written even more things about this show I loved (like how Veronica likes multiple guys and she's NOT portrayed as a whore, or the subplot involving her mom) but I didn't want to go on even longer, let it suffice to say that I fell hard for this show and I was wondering why I didn't try out this show earlier. A look at the show's air dates clears that one up, it would've started airing late middle school/early high school for me and even if I had seen the show then I don't think I would've connected with it as strongly. But in any case, this is a great, engaging, gripping, smart story that I really recommend to anyone who has any tolerance for realistic fiction/stories involving high school students. I should probably include a trigger warning for rape so just be careful if that applies to anyone (I'd be willing to post in the comments which episodes to look out for if anyone wanted me to).

Anime Review: Clamp School Detectives

I'm quite behind on getting this review up, I finished the series right before all the spring shows finished airing so it got pushed back quite a bit) but considering this is a more obscure work of Clamp's I don't think anyone minded too much. Actually, not only is the manga a more obscure work of theirs (although it was published by TokyoPop), it was only two or three volumes long yet this series is two cour, much longer and I'd say it has a lot of filler in it except, well, there aren't many episodes that wouldn't be called filler here. 

Clamp School Detectives

Summary: The Elementary School Student Council at the Clamp School wields an enormous amount of power, although generally it’s three members (the ultra rich Nokoru, ninja-like Suoh, and cheerful gentleman thief Akira) don’t let that go to their heads.

The Good: The show is at it’s best when it’s doing something silly and it knows it’s silly (such as the play episode) and, odd as it sounds, once the love interests for Suoh and Akira show up (Nagisa and Utako respectively) the show gets better and is at it’s most entertaining. The girls are interesting, and once you get over the age difference* they make pretty cute couples as well. For people who are already avid fans of CLAMP’s other work it’s fun to spot crossovers and references within the show (mostly from Miyuki-chan in Wonderland and Dukylon School Defenders, although the setting here would later cross over with X/1999) but they never become so important that it would distract a newcomer to the 'verse.

The Bad: This show has some incredibly uneven pacing, possibly as a result of the show being a 26 episode adaptation of a three volume manga (the crossovers from Dukylon and Man of Many Faces don't add that much material in). The first eight episodes are the weakest and the last arc isn’t much better; funny enough it’s when the girls appear that the series seems to pick up and when they have a smaller role in the last arc (really the only true arc of the series, there are one or two two-parters but nearly everything else is a stand-alone episode) that the show slows down again. It's odd considering they’re supporting characters at best, not show-driving characters, but I guess for a character driven show you really need all the characters you can get so that there are simply more to interact with each other.

The Audio: The show got a dub only a few years ago from a small studio called Costal Carolina (who hasn’t done much work over the years, I think this is their most recent work and it’s from 2008) and it’s surprisingly solid for a show that features three young boys as the main characters (not to dismiss US of the voice actors, but I very rarely find the “young boy voice” convincingly done in English). It’s certainly listenable and I liked it just a bit more than the Japanese, I saw about half the show in English and half in Japanese so for once I can make that comparison! Other than that, the opening theme rather infectious but the rest of the music didn’t leave a strong impression on me.  

The Visuals: Like many shows from the 90s, I wasn’t too crazy on the visuals when I first saw the show but once I saw the re-mastered version I was impressed (sadly I could only find a crappy, not-remastered image that worked for this review). The lines were crisp, there was no glow (before it was impossible to make out half of the opening because of the glow), and the colors were amazingly bright, I’m always amazed when I see just how bright the show actually was. So, once I saw the good version of the show, everything looked pretty nice from the backgrounds to the character designs (I’m more fond of Clamp’s uber-shojo style than their noodle-people style) and, while the character designs do date the show I don’t see that as problem when recommending it to people.

In the end, I think I would have liked this show much more if it had been 13 episodes long and simply cut out a lot of stuff. There's no real plot to the show, and when it gets the closest to that it drags and has a facepalm worthy resolution, so it wouldn't be hard to cut a lot of stuff and still leave the episodes where the characters get some development and the funniest episodes (like that play one) still in. And if you want to watch it yourself, it's not streaming legally anywhere online that I could find but the DVD collection is easily available online.   

*I just tried to pretend it wasn’t so big and, considering how mature Nagisa and Utako were that was easy to do, plus compared to Cardcaptor Sakura this is nothing....