Apologies for going AWOL, last week was a bit rough, and there was a wedding involved, so I'm just shuffling around my book reviews so that I stay on track. Although, out of all of the material that I review, I have more books waiting to be talked about than anything else so that is a bit of a problem. I really don't have the energy to do additional reviews every week but at this rate it's going to be a race until the end of June for that "best books of 2015" post (yes I know I said initially it was going to be earlier but I'm still reading books!)
To the topic at hand, hurray, more sports anime that's fun above all else.! I feel like Haikyuu is also a really great example of how to make a shounen sports show for women, just give the characters personalities and the fans will flock!
I started reading this comic between late July and early September, I believe I got this recommendation from one of the many "webcomic recommendation" links I posted, and then realized I had actually seen this comic earlier. I had actually seen a banner for this at Otakon but since it was an image of Bittle holding a pie I couldn’t tell if it was about hockey or about a waiter whose customers just never seemed to leave/pay. I mention this not because I think it’s a bad banner advertisement, just because I think this would be a hilarious AU and someone should get on that now please!
I like sports shows, I watch so many of them I cant really say otherwise, but my favorites are the ones that use the sport as a stepping off point to explore a character's life. If a show is just about a sport then why bother watching, I'd rather just play it, and Taisho Baseball Girls is about far more than baseball. Set in Taisho-era Japan, Akkiko has just been told by her fiancee that girls could never play baseball so she ropes in her best friend Koume to form a team, despite knowing nothing about the sport and practically none of their friends in an all-girls school for ladies do either. But with some pluck they form a team and the show doesn't neglect to show just how much work it is to get in shape for a sport so it is truly a sports show.
To be honest when I was a few episodes in I was a bit bored by the show and contemplated dropping it but kept going on along anyway and it wasn't until halfway through the show that it just grabbed me. The girls are having next to no luck playing other teams since there aren't any other girls' teams out there and so their ace hitter has grabbed Koume (the catcher) and the two are accosting pitchers from the guys teams late at night so she can practice hitting a bigger variety of pitches. Naturally the rest of the team wants in when they hear about it and somehow the episode ends with the entire team, trying to be incognito, chasing a bunch of neighborhood robbers around with their baseball bats. When a series manages to have something silly escalate that much there's no way I couldn't love it!
This should be the last of my summer anime reviews which is slightly ironic since it's the most summer of the summer anime I watched and I'm seriously contemplating wearing long underwear to work tomorrow (curse you polar vortex). I didn't start out the summer watching this show but I had a feeling I would get around to it sooner or later and I finally did when friends told me it was actually better than the first season which was an odd thing to hear. I never thought that the first season was particularly good or bad, it had it's good and bad parts but was ultimately a bit bland, to hear that the staff decided to do actual character development and build upon the first season was a bit shocking more than anything else!
Free! Eternal Summer
In case anyone is wondering what happened to the movie review last week, a combination of my library woes and Anime USA just left me with no time to watch the film let alone think about it and talk about it so it's happening this Wednesday instead. Sorry folks, I had like a month of no missed updates there!
Moving onto this review, this year has been an odd one for me anime-wise so far and I realized that might be the case when I looked at my upcoming spring shows and noticed tha I wasn't, over the moon excited for any show and the only one I was confident would be good was a volleyball manga I hadn't even read. Thankfully I did enjoy some of the other shows like Captain Earth and Mushi-shi: The Next Passage but I was right to believe the tumblr hype for this show and thanks to how early it aired I always had something to look forward to during lunch at work on Sundays!
Haikyuu!!
