It figures that the one show I was following that started in the winter was the last one to finish airing in the spring, but with this I am now DONE with all the spring shows and I think I got these all out no more than a month after they finished airing which might be a first. But in any case, the background behind this show was a bit interesting, apparently the show was set to air last summer, was held up because of the 2011 earthquake (not entirely sure how since the show was partially done in France, I believe production company Satelight is actually partially based in France) which meant the show was completely animated before it started airing. This did also mean however the the show went for an anime original ending, when the very initial production on the show started (I believe in 2008) there were only two or three books in the original light novel series published so from episode 20 onwards everything is brand new. So how did the show hold up, both the adaptation parts and the brand new material?
Bodacious Space Pirates (Moretsu Pirates)
Summary: Marika Kato has lived a fairly normal life up until high school when her father that she's never met dies and she discovers that not only was he a pirate but, according to the Letter of Marque he owned, she's the only one who can legally inherit his ship and continue with the family business. She's hesitant about the idea at first but as time goes by it grows on her and she turns out to have a good mind for strategy and finds the jobs fun.
The Good: Let me make one thing clear up front, this is not an all-action all the time series. It certainly has it's action packed moments but spent as much time showing the characters discussing strategy or showing Marika just talking and being a normal girl with her friends. The show passes the Bechdel Test in nearly, if not, every episode and the girls all feel realistic, especially compared to many teenaged girls in anime. So if you go into the series knowing it's not going to be all pirates all the time and that it's a bit slow paced it's much more enjoyable (especially since all this allowed for Marika to really grow throughout
the series which was nice). I was also pleasantly surprised that there
was no romantic subplot surrounding her (although two of the other girls
did turn out to be a couple which was also a nice surprise, especially
since they were actual, fleshed out characters as well). All in all the show was more of a change of pace than I expected and I liked it for that.
The Bad: The last arc seemed to be hit or miss, most people loved it but I really didn't like it since it suddenly introduced a lot of world building that wasn't hinted at earlier on (understandable because it was anime-original, which also made me worried that it might contradict the canon and that would mean there wouldn't be room for a sequel later on) and the mood just felt a little different from the rest of the series. The pace does lag at times, especially between arcs, and sometimes the plans Marika comes up with are a little weird (climax of the third arc I'm looking at you) although nothing compares to some of the random twists they pulled in that last arc. Again, some people liked that arc more since it was more action packed than the other arcs and, conversely, if you are looking for a show that's mostly action this is the wrong sci-fi series to be watching.
The Audio: The opening theme for this series is ridiculously catchy (even if the live action music video for it is strange, cheesy isn't a strong enough word for it) and the show switched back and forth between two ending songs. I preferred the first one used which was also rather upbeat and catchy, they were good, action-y songs that matched this action-y series rather well. The show also made some subtle changes to the animation accompanying both songs over time (mostly adding in characters at the start of a new arc) which I thought was a clever touch and I really appreciated the extra effort there.
The Visuals: The anime character designs were changed, rather dramatically for some of the characters (like Princess Serenity, a redhead with a ponytail in the book, and Chiaki who had very different bangs, glasses, and school uniform) and I do prefer the novel's design for some of the character like Marika. Funny enough I do like the design changes made to some of the spaceships (especially the Odette II's design, the novel version just looked a bit silly) and by and large all the designs are interesting and fit in well with everything else in the series. There are some times, especially as the series progresses on, where if you stop at the wrong point the characters look a bit off which normally I'd hope that a show would fix for it's DVD/BR release but, given that the show was finished before it even aired, I don't think that'll be the case.
So, since the show has been licensed by Sentai (and it can be viewed either on their website or on Crunchyroll), do I plan on eventually buying this show? I suppose yes, that last arc really did make me not enjoy the series as much and made me less keen to buy it. But I did enjoy the rest of the show, and I can easily just not watch the last few episodes, so someday I shall try to grab it on sale. Not sure if I'll see the movie that is coming out though, I've seen most fans speculating that it'll be connected to that last arc, but I hope it does well for the series regardless.
This time around I caught my British-class-based-social-drama show on Hulu+ (they have a one week free trial offer which is *just* long enough to watch almost nine hours of episodes, plus it looked great on our new HD tv) and I was able to clear up something about the first season via Hulu as well. Previously I had been worried that the episodes on Netflix (from the first season) might have been cut/edited in some way, because they had such odd runtimes, but they all matched up with the episode lengths listed on Hulu so it appears I was being overly worried that time. But enough about what I've already covered on this blog, onto the second season!
Downton Abbey (season two)
Summary: World War I has began and all of Europe is effected by it. Even Downton Abbey has gone through changes because of the far off war, they are losing their young men to the front lines and seeing others come back to the local hospital lucky to be alive. The war isn't their only problem though, in a house this large there will always be more than a few secrets and there are some people who have large secrets to hide and friends who are bad at keeping them.
The Good: Once again the show manages to balance about a dozen different subplots and gives resolution, or at least the promise of continuation in a few cases, to all of them. They even give a bit more resolution to one or two subplots from the previous season, and Mr. Bates' woes continue as one of the most prominent subplots, and I was never bored by any of the characters. I was also surprised at how much some of the characters grew on me this season, especially the Dowager Countess who, while not exactly a nice person and certainly not a forward thinking one, always had an interesting opinion and did care about more things than I expected.
The Bad: The show certainly upped the melodrama this season and, while some melodrama is okay (especially with a shorter show like this), the fact that a lot of this was accomplished by either the characters being absolutely incapable of keeping secrets or via Mrs. Bates (who didn't even feel like a character, she honestly felt like a plot device that got away from the writers) was frustrating. I hope that the melodrama is toned down again next season (although I'm not betting on it) since after a while I was starting to roll my eyes when another complication arose in some of the subplots which I had hoped the show was done with. Oh and I would like Thomas to have some actual character development this time, he keeps having all these scenes and problems that seem to give him development but then by the next episode he's back to his old self without even a hint of anything having changed and it's really starting to bug me.
The Audio: The show used the exact same themes for the opening and closing credits (the same visuals for the opening as well) and I didn't notice any other changes to the music either which means there's not much for me to talk about. I do hope there's more variety in the music the next season (especially since the show is in the 1920s now and, in the US anyway, that was the era of all kinds of amazing music) but for the moment everything continues as it has before.
The Visuals: As with the first season the clothes all look fantastic (well, perhaps not the servants clothes but even the military uniforms look rather dashing) and the setting looks quite nice as well. One nitpick I do have however is how, by the end of the season, it has been five years in story since the beginning of the first season and yet none of the characters seem to have aged. I worked out that the youngest sister would have been 16 when the show started and 21 by this point and frankly she never looked that young in the first season and by that logic the oldest sister must be at least 23 yet again the actress looks just a bit too old for this. Most people do age noticeably in that time period and I do wish they had shown at least a bit of aging for the characters, it might've made the timeskips a bit easier to keep track of as well.
I can seen now why some people said the show went down a bit in the second season (there really is a lot of melodrama) but overall I still found the show rather enjoyable. The third season airs in the UK this fall but not in the US until winter (on, who else has a gap for something like this, PBS) so it's going to be quite a while until I talk about this show again. Guess I'd better find another British tv show or two to watch in the meantime....
Oddly enough for me I read a few adult fiction books this summer and enjoyed all of them, something which probably won't continue in the fall since I'm still not sure where my school library keeps the adult fiction (I blame the fact they use the Library of Congress system of ordering which is a total pain to find things in). I had heard a bit of buzz for this book's sequel and I realized that I occasionally listen to a podcast, Writing Excuses, which the author co-hosts and since I liked what she had to say there I thought that was a good enough reason to try the book out. I haven't gotten around to trying out the sequel yet but I do plan to do so when my reading pile isn't as ridiculous as it got in the past few months.
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Knowal
Summary: Jane Ellsworth is the 28 year old spinster daughter of the Ellsworth family and, while she's a charming young lady and quite talented at using Glamour (magic that alters how reality looks and to an extent how it interacts with it's surroundings), she's not stunningly beautiful and has resigned herself to the maiden aunt while her younger sister will eventually marry. But that doesn't mean she's one to sit by idly when her friends or family are in trouble and in the process she ends up having her own story to tell.
The Good: Despite the fact that magic is an important part of the story, and that the story would have played out quite differently without it, Kowal makes it clear early on that it is not the most important part of the story and always made sure that, while it certainly helped move the story along at parts, it never overwhelmed the story or was the major driving force. I thought it was great that she was able to balance something so fantastical with Jane's rather mundane life and that she was able to create a very natural setting out of it. Also, a love triangle develops in the story (concerning Jane) and, while I was able to figure out by the end of the first few chapters who she would end up with, I felt that the way it was resolved was a very logical and in a way sincere manner. To keep spoilers to a minimum, there is a scene near the end where Jane and one of the men are talking and there is a moment where both Jane and the audience realize that, even though both of them have feelings for each other, they have some very different principles and Jane sees that she just can't agree with them and holds true to her own values and chooses the other man. I just really liked how that played out, especially since Jane is 28 and her suitors are at least that old/maybe even older, and more mature characters should (hopefully!) mean a more mature resolution for their problems.
The Bad: While the romance is certainly done well, and I really like how the love triangle was resolved, as I said earlier it was dead simple to see who Jane would choose in the end just because it was the same person that nearly every heroine in her situation would have. Ie, while it does what it set out to do well it doesn't do anything better than I've ever seen or do anything new (except the part with the magic but, also as stated above, that's not the main focus of the story regardless). Thankfully the story was strong enough that it never became dull but I wonder if some people, who have read a lot of Austin-esque romance, might find it a bit dull.
So again, despite the fact that this book felt more like comfort food than a strange, and oddly tasty, new dish I still rather liked it and plan on reading Glamor in Glass whenever I come across it. Hmm, it seems that I'm reading, and enjoying, more stories set in Regency England these days, maybe there's simply more stories in that setting being published so it's easier to find stories that I like.
I've heard about the Fables series over the years but never had a chance to read them and I've been a bit too intimidated to blind buy them at the bookstore, there were always so many different issues and I had no idea where to start. But when I picked up this book at the local college library the very first page was an introduction for new readers and explained that this book was set before the story proper. Well, that takes care of all of my inital problems, so how did the book itself fare?
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall by Bill Willingham and illustrated by James Jean and Charles Vess
Summary: Fables is a world where all fairy tales come from a common place and have escaped The Adversary by coming to our world and living in a small, close knit community in America. But not long after their escape, and before the story proper begins, Snow White travels to the Arabian section of their fairy tale land to warn of The Adversary and offer them a place in their new life. She accidentally becomes the queen of King Shahryar who plans to kill her at sunrise since he no longer trusts women. In order to prolong her life, Snow White begins to tell him tales of the old world and has many tales to tell.
The Good: By the end of this volume I had not only a good feel for how this story was paced but also of the backstory leading up to the main tale and the history of what seem to several major characters. It was a great introduction to the series, perfectly bringing in exposition while not overwhelming the entire story, the stories themselves were interesting, and Willingham tied it all together very well in the end. I was glad to see at least a mention of fairy tales that weren't European based (since I have seen many of these "all legends are real" mash-ups over the years but usually "all stories" ends up meaning "just European, with a focus on Western European, tales") and that inclusion is the biggest reason that I am just a bit curious about the rest of the series.
The Bad: Years ago I read a very good adaptation of 1001 Nights (Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher, a middle grade book) and ever since I've been rather biased when it comes to retellings and I didn't find the overall story here quite as gripping as that one. There wasn't anything wrong with Snow White or her own story, it just wasn't as amazing and I was kinda miffed that Scheherazade only had a paragraph of screen time. I felt like there were one or two parts that would have made more sense if I had been familiar with the rest of the series (like the part with The Big Bad Wolf) but that only happened a few times.
The Art: Amazon only lists two illustrators for this volume which I really hope is right since it seemed like there were more than two art styles in the book. Rather surprisingly for me I liked most, although not all, of the art in the book* and, given that the book was composed of many smaller stories within a larger one, I didn't find the art shifts jarring and they made sense. All of the stories were also very easy to follow paneling wise which seems a bit like a silly thing to mention but I have come across so many stories where you can tell the artist is an amateur because they don't understand how an eye looks at the page. Here there were no problems at all and it made reading this much easier and go much faster.
So, will I track down more volumes of Fables after this? Probably not actually, the series is still on-going, huge, like I said earlier I don't have easy access to it, and it seems to have much greater variety of artists and I didn't really like the art in the volumes I've flipped through before. Despite their best efforts here, which were fantastic, it's a bit of an intimidating series to get into, so for the moment I'll stick with all the other series I already follow that revolve around the "all stories are true" premise.
*surprising only because I don't seem to like the art style in most American comics books, which isn't for any particular reason I've been able to figure out but there are just a few stylistic things I come across in American comic books (verses manga/manhaw/webcomics) that I've disliked since elementary school, years before I read any other comics.
Another one of Sentai's many pick-ups, I was intrigued by the premise where I heard was something along the lines "high schoolers in a paranormal club solve mysteries that eventually connect to who killed their ghostly president." The story doesn't quite play out like that but I guess I should just get to the review to talk about that!
Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (Tasogare Otome X Amnesia)
Summary: Niiya Teichi never expected to run into a ghost in the old school building, much less for that ghost to develop a crush on him and for him to feel something for her as well. But Yuuko isn't just a ghost, with few memories of her past and rumors flying everywhere Teichi and the other members of the Paranormal Investigation Club soon realize that there was something sinister behind her death, something that is connected to the few, true ghost stories the school has.
The Good: I had to rewatch a little bit of the show, to check the lyrics for the songs, and I have to say the show started foreshadowing much earlier than I thought that there was something decidedly sinister behind Yuuko's death and I must give them credit for that. The show actually managed to tie in almost all of the urban legends that the club comes across in the end and Yuuko's story is easily the strongest part of the show. And I really did like the opening episode which showed the story both from the point of view of Teichi and from the point of view of the one character who can't see Yuuko, I wish the series had had a bit more humor like that.
The Bad: I really didn't like the early episodes that didn't focus on the mystery surrounding Yuuko, because that was the central point of the show and anything that doesn't contribute to that idea in one way or another is filler, and I was about to drop the show which I very rarely do. If one was to cut most of the episodes that didn't contribute to the plot then you don't have nearly enough material for a full length series, it's only 12 episodes to start with, and sadly this wasn't an anime original series, this was an adaptation based off of a manga and you can't cut that much of a series out. The fanservice was repetitive and awkward as someone who is not turned on by boobies (and I certainly wasn't expecting it from promo shots like the one above), only three characters in the entire series receive character development and I disliked the ending as well. In the end, this wasn't the show I was expecting and sadly it wasn't the kind of show I like either.
The Audio: It's been a little while since I've seen an opening or ending that is lip-synced to a character on screen and both of the ones here were shot more like they were music videos for Yuuko than a normal opening and closing. I thought that made them a bit more interesting (although I thought that for the one ending where Yuuko was removed from all the shots it would have worked a little better if they had used the instrumental version of the song instead), although the song lyrics I saw really didn't work. It's true that the stream from The Anime Network I saw the opening lyrics were horribly out of sync which might not have helped, and the ending seemed average and nothing from the rest of the soundtrack stood out to me either.
The Visuals: Since the show is a little dull in parts, and doesn't feel very original either, someone on the production committee must've said "you know what this series needs? ARTSY VISUALS!" and that's what happened. It's not as "artsy" looking as say, a show from Studio Shaft might be (Bakemonogatari, Madoka Magica) but it certainly stands out from other shows in the spring season with it's use of dramatic lighting, composition, and interesting color choices. Overall though I found the artsy bits to be rather, well, amateur, like a newly graduated graphic designer had decided that they had to alter everything they could get their hands on to make it more dynamic. I do like shows that have interesting imagery and symbolism in them (see Revolutionary Girl Utena) but here I felt like the visuals were trying to compromise for an average plot and that just annoyed me.
So, no buy from me but for those who are curious you can check out the show over on Crunchyroll or over on The Anime Network (since they're using the hulu player you can probably go straight to hulu and find it as well). I can't see this one doing well enough to merit a dub/BR but who knows, still wouldn't change my opinion on it at all in the end.
