Animefangirl!

Dropped Danchigai, Kuusen Madoushi and Madan no Ou to Vanadis

Danchigai – I usually like anime with short episodes but in this case 3 minutes felt like 3 hours. Nothing significant happened – guy woke up, bickered with siblings, went to school, but they still had to throw in unnecessary tsundereness and suggestive content. There were no compelling situations, no story or even background (who are these people and why are they all living together?) so nothing made me want to watch any more after an episode.

Kuusen Madoushi Kouhosei No Kyoukan – Started out somewhat interesting with all those bug monsters. The little combat I saw didn’t look too interesting, but I figured it would get better as stuff was explained later. Unfortunately before that we had to deal with the usual “funny” misunderstandings with the main character walking around with jam on his crotch and walking into the women’s bathroom and all those other situations I haven’t found funny in about 10 years.

The idea of an elite fighter taking charge of a bunch of weaklings and whipping them into shape is a good one, but it was clear from episode 1 that the show is going to be more about perverted incidents and harem-type occurrences instead of just normal fighting and training like I was hoping for. Not my cup of tea. Next.

Madan no Ou to Vanadis – I was looking for more shows with overpowered MCs after finishing Mahouka, and someone recommended this. Well, the hero isn’t quite as overpowered as Tatsuya. He’s just really, really good with a bow and then he gets a super magic bow and well, you can take it from there.

I watched about 3 or 4 episodes, up to the point where he kills the dragon with the magic bow. I dropped it because it was boring. The skimpily-dressed ladies falling all over the main guy didn’t help the show’s case, but if the political intrigue and the battles had been any good there could have been hope. But really, there’s only so much you can do with a bow and an arrow. Point, and shoot. Point, and shoot. Booorriiing. After watching a long, supposedly strategic battle I couldn’t bring myself to root for any of the sides and didn’t see the point of continuing.

Yay, my backlog is shrinking! I’ll post about another reject next time – the only reason I didn’t add it today is because it comes highly recommended so I want to give it one more episode to get its act together. See you next time!

My Little Monster anime review (eps 1-5)

I’m not sure how exactly I came to start watching My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun). I think I may have downloaded an episode by accident when looking for Tonari no Seki-kun episodes, or maybe I got it back when it was first airing and forgot about it. Either way before I knew it I had the first episode on my laptop, so I proceeded to watch it a few days ago.

Story: Shizuku Mizutani only has one thing in mind: getting good grades. To accomplish this goal, she has little interest in anything else. However, after delivering lesson notes to her resident delinquent classmate Haru Yoshida, the latter is convinced that they are friends. Initially, Shizuku is intimidated by such a troublesome person, but she gradually notices that Haru is actually a kind person. When Haru confesses to Shizuku, an unlikely romance begins to blossom between them.

I liked: The blunt honesty of the main characters. Haru is a very silly guy, but he’s very open about his feelings for Shizuku. Shizuku is also a nice change from the usual cowardly, simpering, brainless shoujo main character. She actually has a spine and an agenda outside “Get guy X to like me”, at least at first. I also found it unusual but intriguing to have the main guy confess to the main girl so early in the show and then have her return his feelings just an episode or two later.

I didn’t like: Unfortunately we can’t have anything so refreshing in a shoujo series, so instead of building up the relationship from there, the two confessions somehow cancel each other out. Huh? Only in anime, eh? Thus instead of the different take on shoujo romance I was hoping for, we end up with the same old “He loves me, he loves me not, maybe he loves this other girl, maybe I don’t love him” merry-go-round that we’ve seen 20,000 times before. My Little Monster, I am disappoint.

What’s worse than that is the downfall of Haru’s character. He started out a little wild but basically a good guy… for all of 10 minutes in the first episode. Then he turns into the kind of guy who smacks Shizuku in the face and never apologizes and regularly seizes her by the collar but somehow he’s still her love interest anyway. “He hits me but it’s okay because he loves me?” Not only is it not okay, but he doesn’t even love you!

Every other episode she’s like “Haru’s such a kind person.” What kind of kind person would punch a girl and not even say he was sorry? Even your garden-variety domestic abuser can muster up a few crocodile tears of apology every time. Up to the end of episode 5 it still wasn’t clear what exactly Shizuku saw in Haru. It seems like she would have felt the same way about any other guy with a nice smile who confessed his love and kissed her within a few days of meeting her.

The other issue with Haru’s personality is probably less his fault and more my problem for being sick and tired of every single shoujo manga love interest having some kind of family issue and some kind of dark history and some kind of trauma somewhere. It’s like an edict was passed around 1995 stating that no sensible, decent, well-adjusted guy was allowed to be the main guy in shoujo manga ever again. They all have to be messed up somehow, no exceptions. Well 1995 was 20 years ago, can we go back to ordinary, likeable, relateable male characters now? Please?

That way Haru could have stayed the funny, naive, happy-go-lucky guy (with a violent streak) that he started out as instead of having to deal with all this drama with his dad and his brother and who knows what else in his family. I don’t want to watch all that, it’s boring. I’m sure Shizuku will later turn out to have issues of her own, equal opportunity and all that. She’s already lost the focus on grades that made her interesting and become the usual “Squee, he smiled at me *blush blush*” kind of heroine. *sigh*

Long story short, I don’t want to see anything more from this show. My Little Monster is just the same old shoujo tropes dolled up slightly differently but ultimately working out the same way. If you like shoujo manga, you’ll probably love it since it’s more of the same with a slight twist. If you’re not a fan of the old “going round in circles for 10 volumes rigamarole, avoid. For me it’s dropped after 5 episodes. On to the next show!

Hanayamata dropped for being too whiny

It’s bad of me, I know, but I didn’t even finish episode 1 of Hanayamata. I was feeling quite favorably inclined towards a series about Japanese dance because I enjoyed Aki no Kanade so much, but this isn’t quite what I was looking for. For one thing it takes Hanayamata forever to get round to the actual dancing part. It hasn’t even happened yet in episode 1 and who knows when it will take place. Instead all the time is taken up by the heroine Naru whining on about how not-special she is and how much she wants to be a fairy princess and on and on. I know she’s 14 and that’s pretty much par for the course at that age, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying to watch.

There aren’t any other likeable characters to root for either. Based on the preview of episode 2 her friend Yaya-chan is probably going to turn jealous and clingy before being rehabilitated. The American Hana is just your stereotypical blonde, hyper Western otaku that you come across from time to time in anime these days. It would have been pretty interesting if she had indeed turned out to be something otherworldly like in Naru’s imagination, but no she’s just another weeaboo.

And what’s with all that blushing? It should be possible to set an anime in a girls’ school without having them always blushing at each other and idolizing the other girls and on and on with the yuri overtones. Long story short, halfway through episode 1 of Hanayamata I realized there was no dancing, there was a lot of whining and blushing and there were no likeable characters, so I’m going to bail while the getting is good. Scratch another item off my backlog!

Saekano after 6 episodes (dropped)

You can refer to my first post on Saenai Kanojo no Sodatekata here. Basically I thought the show had a bit of promise but didn’t want to wait every week for new episodes so I shelved it until it was complete and then some. 9 months later I finally settled down to watch the show, but…

As I said back then, I wanted to see what would happen when you added a third, ordinary character to a generic anime love triangle. The answer seems to be absolutely nothing. After episode 3 it seemed like best girl Megumi had won (or rather lost, since the hero Tomoya is so annoying), which was all good and nice, but then episode 6 rolls around and it’s all about Tomoya’s past, angsty non-relationship with Utaha-sempai? Where’d that come from? And who cares? It doesn’t matter any more. I thought best girl had won!

I hate those series where the author spends a little time building a relationship between A and B, then no, no, C has a chance too, no wait, D too, and round and round and round it goes. When I sign up for a harem I know it’s a harem, so I’m ready for that whole rigamarole (that’s why I avoid harems these days actually) but I was hoping for something a little less stale and hackneyed with Saekano. More fool me, I guess. Basically I dropped Saekano because it turned out to be a harem when I wasn’t looking for a harem.

There’s a second reason, though, which is the visual novel Tomoya and his group are going to be making. The story was revealed around episode 5 and TBH it’s bad. Really bad. It starts well but then turns into a yandere incestuous reincarnation romance with giant monsters? If it’s supposed to be a parody of something famous (Eva? Titan?) then sorry, it flew clean over my head. And hopefully landed in the garbage dump, there to stay forever. And the characters are just falling over themselves gushing with praise about how moving it is. Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t even let my dog poop on a story like that. No thanks.

To recap, I can’t support the romance because it’s not going the way I wanted it to. And just btw, Tomoya is a lot more annoying than I remember. That ‘noisy passionate otaku’ gimmick was funny the first few times I saw it, but now it’s played out. His brief moments of seriousness only making the yelling more obnoxious, because then his whole otaku persona just seems put-on and fake. Just be a normal guy, okay? There’s only one good character in the whole show and I think Megumi would be better off walking away from this whole stupid circle.

Right, so to recap the romance sucks and the game they’re making sucks, so there’s nothing for me root for in Saekano. If I had nothing else to watch I might finish it out of sheer inertia, but my backlog is HUGE and growing larger all the time. If an anime isn’t really knocking my socks off after 6 episodes I think I’m better off just reading summaries online and moving on to something else. Saekano is best left to people who like otaku romances that probably won’t ever go anywhere, the end.

Dragon Sister volume 1 manga review

I didn’t even finish Dragon Sister volume 1, but I’m going to “review” it anyway. It’s the only way to get relief from my suffering. I know near the end Tokyopop was licensing anything that looked even slightly like a manga, but I didn’t know the problem was this bad. When I think of all the delightful little series, maybe a little average but certainly not as bad as Dragon Sister, that could have been licensed instead, well it brings a little tear to my eye.

As usual, the blurb:

The classic Chinese tale of The Three Kingdoms–with all your favorite historical figures cast as cute girls! As the Han Dynasty collapses, two mighty warriors–Zhang Fei and Guan Yu–stand strong against the tide of rebellion. But because these fighters are female, their dreams of fighting in the Imperial army are nothing but dreams… until they find a patron and like-minded brother in Liu Bei, an idealistic descendant of royalty with dreams of his own. Forging a pact, the three form a volunteer army dedicated to restoring peace, which means first defeating three deceptively adorable sisters who oppose them, and who have their own, definitely cuter, plan for China’s future… One thing’s for sure–history’s about to get a makeover!

The first line is the beginning of my troubles – I have never been able to keep all the characters and plot twists of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms straight. Dragon Sister is probably the closest I’ve come to understanding all the different factions and which character belongs where, which they manage by keeping the main cast down to 6, 9 if you count a few extras. That’s a good start.

What’s not so good is that the mangaka (nini?) assumes that everyone is completely familiar with the plot, so s/he just jumps straight from important event to important event without any explanation. First the heroes/heroines meet up and decide to fight together. Next chapter they’re already in the middle of a battle, then suddenly the battle is over. Suddenly they meet Cao Cao, then just as suddenly he disappears. Next battle they’re already in the loyalist camp kicking up a fuss over something inconsequential. Is that how the original story went? I don’t know, but it’s hard enough to follow all the different factions without any smooth transitions from Point A to B to help keep things straight.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst was the waste of the premise. The idea is that due to a curse, all the heroes of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms have been reborn as women. It’s not the first time a writer has recast historical characters as different genders and it won’t be the last. In Dragon Sister though, the problems are threefold.

If all heroes are women, why are Liu Bei and Cao Cao still male? Aren’t they heroes? Or will there be a reveal later that they were women all along?
Zhang Fei and Guan Yu spend time kvetching because being women keeps them from fighting for the loyalist army. Then it turns out Dong Zhuo, leader of said army, is a woman as well. So being a woman isn’t the barrier it was set up to be, Why bother having that gimmick in the first place?
Turns out the gimmick exists for the sake of cheap titillation, nothing more. I should have known as much when I saw that cover. Dong Zhuo almost always comes across poorly in RotK adaptations, and this time she’s a sneaky lesbian who lusts after the heroines and dresses them in revealing clothing (that’s actually less revealing than Guan Yu’s standard outfit) so they can trip and show off body parts. What happened to telling a story?

It’s a shame the series is so sub-part because I quite liked the clean art style. It just screams “modern shounen,” like Naruto meets Full Metal Alchemist kind of art. Still good art will only take you so far without good writing. No wonder even Tokyopop dropped it after two volumes. If you’re that hung up on seeing your favorite RotK heroes redrawn as women, or if you’re such a big fan that you’ll buy anything set in that era, then I guess you might get something out of Dragon Sister. Otherwise it’s not something to go out of your way to read.