Anime post.
Aug. 18th, 2007 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenHaving a few weeks of break is always good for marathoning anime. I'm up to episode 17 of Kamichama Karin now. It's a fun show. When it first started out, it seemed pretty dark and serious given what little I knew of Koge Donbo, but then the series moved into a segment of mostly filler character development that was more light-hearted and good for the easily amused. Somehow Kirio turned into Team Rocket (fixated on stealing Karin's ring and frequently getting blasted off by God Thunder) and someone high up became fond of having Kazune in drag every single episode. But by 17, it's gotten back to it's serious, twisting plotline for the most part. I really don't care which way the show goes -- I enjoy it regardless. It's probably pretty typical in its filler moments -- you've got the hot springs episode, and the episode where the male and female leads find their hands inexplicably stuck together for a day -- but hey, I'm easily amused, and I like the characters. Not sure if or to whom I would recommend this anime, but it's high on my own list, anyway.
[Summary: Kamichama Karin is a pretty typical magical girl type show. Karin suddenly discovers she can transform into a goddess (or a mini-goddess, hence "kamichama") by borrowing the power of Athena. She meets Kazune and Himeka and ends up living with them and going to their school. Kazune has the power of Apollo. They run into trouble with Karasuma Kirio, who is intent on stealing Karin's ring. There are rumblings of deeper plot, but at the moment, it's unclear what the purpose of the godly powers are or where they come from exactly.]
I guess I haven't been in the mood for serious things lately, so I've fallen a bit behind in Seirei no Moribito, but I still recommend it highly. It's a very well-put-together show: compelling story, great character development, gorgeous scenery. I'm fond of the idyllic medieval Asia (?) setting. Although I really wouldn't compare it to Miyazaki in feel, I think there are some similarities in the way the story has its epic bits as well as its very personal "growing up" parts. (I love Miyazaki for his "growing up" movies like Spirited Away and Tonari no Totoro. But in terms of feel, this show is nothing like Mushishi or most Miyazaki films.)
[Summary: Seirei no Moribito is about Balsa, a spear-wielding bodyguard, who takes charge of Chagum, the second son of the Emperor of New Yogo. It's discovered that he's bearing the egg of a water spirit, and people are out to kill him for it.]
Along the lines of serious but really bad-ass is Darker than Black. Unlike Seirei no Moribito, it's set in a very modern world, a little dystopian, very film noir and dark. The episodes come in pairs, which at least initially are fairly disjointed vignettes about people you'll probably never see again after those two episodes, but at the same time they develop different aspects of the main character's personality. Did I mention I'm a sucker for tormented protagonists with deadly skills in dark trenchcoats? Don't screw this one up, Funimation.
[Summary: Darker than Black is about people called Contractors who gained supernatural powers after a strange structure known as Hell's Gate appeared. It focuses on Hei a Contractor who works for a mysterious organization that's interested in other Contractors. There's also a Japanese agency whose investigations often lead to their crossing paths.]
I watched a bit more of Touka Gettan, in which I continue to have no idea what is going on. And then I discovered something: the episodes are in backwards chronological order. Well, things still don't make sense, and I don't want to think about the implications of that fact, but at least now I know how to proceed: I'm waiting until all the episodes are out and then watching them backwards. Take that, insane producer people. I can't believe they would intentionally be so obscure and confusing. I bet the series will suck no matter which direction you watch it: because it's written to be watched in the order it's aired, and yet it's more intuitive to do it the other way around. And yet, like I said, I somehow just can't pull myself away. Grrrr-baaah.
[Summary: Touka Gettan is about high school students who are really the reincarnations (?) of these people who lived a long time ago. At least one of those past incarnations died in a traumatic manner and had special powers, which other people seem to be after. Or something like that.]
Kaze no Stigma is still fun. I seem to have a lot of series right now with main characters for me to crush on. (Hei from Darker than Black, Kazune from Kamichama Karin, and Kazuma from Kaze no Stigma.) I think this series really is just about the characters and their interactions. Kazuma's coolness is the perfect foil for Ayano's hot-headedness, and it's just so much fun to see his poker face when she's being awkward or stupid. (Yeah, I know, they'll end up together. It's inevitable.) The story is moving in fairly discrete arcs so far, though perhaps a running theme is having them be at odds in turn with each of the other elemental clans -- first wind, and now earth.
[Summary: Kaze no Stigma is about Kazuma, who was cast out from the clan of fire-wielders because he had no abilities. He then formed a contract with the Spirit King of the Wind and gained the powers of a wind-wielder. Now he's back and having to deal with Ayano, the hot-headed heiress of the clan of fire-wielders, and his really cute little brother (think Momiji from Fruits Basket), who's a pretty skilled fire-wielder himself but kind of a sucker in general.]
I'm also trying to keep up with Romeo x Juliet. It's sort of moving away from the Shakespeare version, and there hasn't been Tybalt for a while, so I'm losing interest a bit, but I think they've got a lot of interesting things in store, and I'm curious whether they will really end it as a tragedy.
[Summary: Romeo x Juliet is about Romeo, son of the dictator of Neo Verona, and Juliet, daughter of the ousted former ruler, who has lived in hiding until her sixteenth birthday when she will raise the Capulet banner and reclaim the city. She and Romeo fall in love, of course, and things kind of go downhill from there.]
Oh, and I actually finished two series: Shining Tears X Wind and Saint Beast ~Kouin Jojishi Tenshitan. Like expected, Shining Tears was a not-so-great anime adaptation of a pretty formulaic video game. [Summary: guy ends up in another world, finds out he can pull swords out of people by forming a deep bond with them, ends up having to save said world from great evil. As always with these kinds of things, the act of pulling out a sword from someone's chest is portrayed as strangely erotic.] I was pleasantly surprised, though, that the protagonist did not stay angsty and angry nearly as long as I thought he would, and things actually moved along pretty nicely. Oh, and the guy voiced by Okiayu Ryoutarou was less of a one-dimensional villain than I thought he would be. Yay.
Saint Beast is one of the most ambitious shows I've ever watched that went absolutely nowhere. I'm not sure what I got out of those episodes at all, except a lot of seiyuu love. It kept seeming like it would go somewhere with the whole "angels dissatisfied with Heaven and Zeus' iron-fisted rule", but nope. It ended with everything pretty much the same as it was at the end of the fourth episode, except with a few more monsters-of-the-day dead.
I watched the two new episodes of Code Geass. Wow, even more unsatisfying than I expected. And Lelouch is starting to annoy me, which is not a good sign.
And Saiunkoku Monogatari goes on as always. Not much I can say about that that's spoiler-free. Oh, I will say this: I hate you Geneon. "Shurei Hong"? And I had faith in you after Fushigi Yuugi and X Remix, too.
New series that's good: Mushiuta. It's about giant bugs that people fight with, who feed off their owners' dreams until the owner dies. This guy works for an organization that kills the bugs, putting their owners into a brain-dead state, who ends up going to the same school as the leader of a resistance movement who's trying to make a place for people who have bugs. It's a pretty slow-paced show -- it took three episodes for things to really happen -- but somehow it's not slow in a way that makes me look at the clock. The use of dramatic irony is a bit heavy-handed, but hey, it's enough to keep me watching. (Also the reassurance that it's only 12 episodes long. Then again, Touka Gettan ended up being changed from 13 to 26.)
New series that's not so good: Zombie Loan. These two guys died in an accident but basically borrowed zombie bodies in order to keep on living. In exchange, they have to kill other zombies who are supposed to have moved on. (Kind of like Bleach, actually.) They find this girl who can tell whether people are supposed to be dead. The first two episodes were basically to establish the relationship between the three. I'll probably give it another episode or two, but right now it feels like it's going to be really formulaic with the fighting monsters thing, I'm not particularly attached to any of the characters, and the character designs are too pointy.
On the backburner, but trying to get back into:
* Hayate no Gotoku - I guess I don't particularly like any of the characters, so even though its humor is much more creative than Kamichama, it's just not as enticing.
* Cluster Edge
* Venus Versus Virus
[Summary: Kamichama Karin is a pretty typical magical girl type show. Karin suddenly discovers she can transform into a goddess (or a mini-goddess, hence "kamichama") by borrowing the power of Athena. She meets Kazune and Himeka and ends up living with them and going to their school. Kazune has the power of Apollo. They run into trouble with Karasuma Kirio, who is intent on stealing Karin's ring. There are rumblings of deeper plot, but at the moment, it's unclear what the purpose of the godly powers are or where they come from exactly.]
I guess I haven't been in the mood for serious things lately, so I've fallen a bit behind in Seirei no Moribito, but I still recommend it highly. It's a very well-put-together show: compelling story, great character development, gorgeous scenery. I'm fond of the idyllic medieval Asia (?) setting. Although I really wouldn't compare it to Miyazaki in feel, I think there are some similarities in the way the story has its epic bits as well as its very personal "growing up" parts. (I love Miyazaki for his "growing up" movies like Spirited Away and Tonari no Totoro. But in terms of feel, this show is nothing like Mushishi or most Miyazaki films.)
[Summary: Seirei no Moribito is about Balsa, a spear-wielding bodyguard, who takes charge of Chagum, the second son of the Emperor of New Yogo. It's discovered that he's bearing the egg of a water spirit, and people are out to kill him for it.]
Along the lines of serious but really bad-ass is Darker than Black. Unlike Seirei no Moribito, it's set in a very modern world, a little dystopian, very film noir and dark. The episodes come in pairs, which at least initially are fairly disjointed vignettes about people you'll probably never see again after those two episodes, but at the same time they develop different aspects of the main character's personality. Did I mention I'm a sucker for tormented protagonists with deadly skills in dark trenchcoats? Don't screw this one up, Funimation.
[Summary: Darker than Black is about people called Contractors who gained supernatural powers after a strange structure known as Hell's Gate appeared. It focuses on Hei a Contractor who works for a mysterious organization that's interested in other Contractors. There's also a Japanese agency whose investigations often lead to their crossing paths.]
I watched a bit more of Touka Gettan, in which I continue to have no idea what is going on. And then I discovered something: the episodes are in backwards chronological order. Well, things still don't make sense, and I don't want to think about the implications of that fact, but at least now I know how to proceed: I'm waiting until all the episodes are out and then watching them backwards. Take that, insane producer people. I can't believe they would intentionally be so obscure and confusing. I bet the series will suck no matter which direction you watch it: because it's written to be watched in the order it's aired, and yet it's more intuitive to do it the other way around. And yet, like I said, I somehow just can't pull myself away. Grrrr-baaah.
[Summary: Touka Gettan is about high school students who are really the reincarnations (?) of these people who lived a long time ago. At least one of those past incarnations died in a traumatic manner and had special powers, which other people seem to be after. Or something like that.]
Kaze no Stigma is still fun. I seem to have a lot of series right now with main characters for me to crush on. (Hei from Darker than Black, Kazune from Kamichama Karin, and Kazuma from Kaze no Stigma.) I think this series really is just about the characters and their interactions. Kazuma's coolness is the perfect foil for Ayano's hot-headedness, and it's just so much fun to see his poker face when she's being awkward or stupid. (Yeah, I know, they'll end up together. It's inevitable.) The story is moving in fairly discrete arcs so far, though perhaps a running theme is having them be at odds in turn with each of the other elemental clans -- first wind, and now earth.
[Summary: Kaze no Stigma is about Kazuma, who was cast out from the clan of fire-wielders because he had no abilities. He then formed a contract with the Spirit King of the Wind and gained the powers of a wind-wielder. Now he's back and having to deal with Ayano, the hot-headed heiress of the clan of fire-wielders, and his really cute little brother (think Momiji from Fruits Basket), who's a pretty skilled fire-wielder himself but kind of a sucker in general.]
I'm also trying to keep up with Romeo x Juliet. It's sort of moving away from the Shakespeare version, and there hasn't been Tybalt for a while, so I'm losing interest a bit, but I think they've got a lot of interesting things in store, and I'm curious whether they will really end it as a tragedy.
[Summary: Romeo x Juliet is about Romeo, son of the dictator of Neo Verona, and Juliet, daughter of the ousted former ruler, who has lived in hiding until her sixteenth birthday when she will raise the Capulet banner and reclaim the city. She and Romeo fall in love, of course, and things kind of go downhill from there.]
Oh, and I actually finished two series: Shining Tears X Wind and Saint Beast ~Kouin Jojishi Tenshitan. Like expected, Shining Tears was a not-so-great anime adaptation of a pretty formulaic video game. [Summary: guy ends up in another world, finds out he can pull swords out of people by forming a deep bond with them, ends up having to save said world from great evil. As always with these kinds of things, the act of pulling out a sword from someone's chest is portrayed as strangely erotic.] I was pleasantly surprised, though, that the protagonist did not stay angsty and angry nearly as long as I thought he would, and things actually moved along pretty nicely. Oh, and the guy voiced by Okiayu Ryoutarou was less of a one-dimensional villain than I thought he would be. Yay.
Saint Beast is one of the most ambitious shows I've ever watched that went absolutely nowhere. I'm not sure what I got out of those episodes at all, except a lot of seiyuu love. It kept seeming like it would go somewhere with the whole "angels dissatisfied with Heaven and Zeus' iron-fisted rule", but nope. It ended with everything pretty much the same as it was at the end of the fourth episode, except with a few more monsters-of-the-day dead.
I watched the two new episodes of Code Geass. Wow, even more unsatisfying than I expected. And Lelouch is starting to annoy me, which is not a good sign.
And Saiunkoku Monogatari goes on as always. Not much I can say about that that's spoiler-free. Oh, I will say this: I hate you Geneon. "Shurei Hong"? And I had faith in you after Fushigi Yuugi and X Remix, too.
New series that's good: Mushiuta. It's about giant bugs that people fight with, who feed off their owners' dreams until the owner dies. This guy works for an organization that kills the bugs, putting their owners into a brain-dead state, who ends up going to the same school as the leader of a resistance movement who's trying to make a place for people who have bugs. It's a pretty slow-paced show -- it took three episodes for things to really happen -- but somehow it's not slow in a way that makes me look at the clock. The use of dramatic irony is a bit heavy-handed, but hey, it's enough to keep me watching. (Also the reassurance that it's only 12 episodes long. Then again, Touka Gettan ended up being changed from 13 to 26.)
New series that's not so good: Zombie Loan. These two guys died in an accident but basically borrowed zombie bodies in order to keep on living. In exchange, they have to kill other zombies who are supposed to have moved on. (Kind of like Bleach, actually.) They find this girl who can tell whether people are supposed to be dead. The first two episodes were basically to establish the relationship between the three. I'll probably give it another episode or two, but right now it feels like it's going to be really formulaic with the fighting monsters thing, I'm not particularly attached to any of the characters, and the character designs are too pointy.
On the backburner, but trying to get back into:
* Hayate no Gotoku - I guess I don't particularly like any of the characters, so even though its humor is much more creative than Kamichama, it's just not as enticing.
* Cluster Edge
* Venus Versus Virus
