even more anime watching

I've been keeping up with the anime watching. I was a little afraid I'd stop, but I haven't - I've kept going. And I'm also keen to keep going.

I think one thing that's really helped was hacking back my telly watching. I'm kinda at a stage where I've nothing to watch except anime. Now normally the risk there would be that I'd play Anno instead.

But I've also had a help there too - for a little while I've had quite a lot of pain in my right shoulder. I don't think it's from over-use of the mouse as I'm fairly sure I strained it, but I am finding that even mouse use at work has been a bit uncomfortable, which has discouraged me from doing much computer wise in the evening.

Unfortunately, extended periods of staring at subtitles has made something else apparent to me - I really need some new glasses. I've been getting headaches and so I think my prescription has changed. But even if it hasn't I'm not surprised - my current glasses are so covered in scratches, that it's like looking through frosted glass.

I've known for a while they were getting bad, but as I say, staring at subtitles that are blurry really brings it home.

Anyway, I finished Mnemosyne last night.

Overall I enjoyed it. There were a few plot holes, as is normal with anime, but overall it did wrap up pretty well. I'm going to do a full review of it on trismugistus.com later, so I won't go into too many details.

However, I also managed to find the time to sample more fansubs, so here's some mini reviews:


Seikon No Qwaser

Seikon No Qwaser is about the power of boobs.

Well, it's not entirely about boobs. It's also one of those shounen series of the D-Grayman type, where the creator has just taken a bunch of random stuff and his favourite series and blended it together.

Here we have some vaguely Christian religious stuff, some alchemy, plenty of fighting, a bit of magic and mystical powers, lashings of fan-service and the aforementioned boobs. Or rather, more specifically, what I think is roughly breast feeding where 'soma' is sucked out of a ladies chesticles.

I say 'think', because the censorship is a bit on the heavy side - it cuts to some random images or the shots are framed weirdly so that you can't see anything. Recent shows with heavy fanservice have tended to use extreme shadows to hide stuff, although you could still roughly see what was going on - here you're really left to guess.

So plenty of fan-service, but you can't see it. Also, it sits on that side of the line where the fan-service is wrapped up into a story element that's so artificial it just becomes annoying. I think shows like Ikki Tousen, Queens' Blade or Kanokon work for me because they're happy to ladle in the fanservice and don't feel guilty about it.

Fan-service is great, so they show it. They don't come up with bizarre and non-sensensical plot elements as an excuse to have it. Well, okay, they do, I suppose, but they don't pretend the fan-service is incidental to that.

I was rather surprised that this was based on a manga, rather than a light novel. Light novels seem to be the home of hackneyed cliché and this is that sort of show.


Kuchu Buranko (trapeze)

Er... okay.

This was a bit of an odd one - both in terms of animation style and what it's about.

The animation was an odd mix of purely drawn stuff, CG and real-world stuff that was either filtered or possibly rotoscoped. It's also a complete riot of psychedelic colours and patterns and there's plenty of weird symbolism going on.

The story is equally odd, being as it focuses on a psychiatrist who appears to be a kid dressed in a clown suit. And the people who come to see him have very weird problems.

I dunno - I can't really explain it, other than to say it kinda works. And it works because it's so weird, but in a consistent way. The weirdness of the style actually complements and enhances the weirdness of story, which is perfectly matched by the weird style.


Umineko No Naku Kori Ni

I don't really know much about Higurashi: When they Cry. I've never seen any of the episodes or read the manga (I think there's a manga? I have a weird notion it's actually a video game originally). I've never even read any summaries of it or anything like that.

I've seen some images via the Japanese anime mags and as scans and wallpapers of course, and from those I kinda picked up it was a horror job, but other than that, nothing.

As such I didn't know what to expect from Umineko - was it a sequel or prequel or side story or basically unrelated? Obviously I can't answer that question, but my guess is that it's thematically similar. In other words, it's a horror, mystery job.

Often I don't like the anime and manga horrors - the disconnect for it to be an animated character makes them less effective. However, I quite liked this. I mean I wouldn't say I was scarred by it, but it looked quite interesting and worth a go.

I'm even tempted to pick up Higurashi and see what that's like.


Aoi Bungaku

Aoi translates to blue. Bungaku appears to be something akin to literature that's written in the form of a diary. I'm guessing, but I therefore think the title roughly translates as Blue Diaries - the blue possibly being a reference to mood as well as the colour blue.

Perhaps that's more a western spin - I don't know if the Japanese regard blue as being a particularly melancholy colour or if they have an expression equivalent to "feeling a bit blue." If they don't it's quite a coincidence, because melancholic diaries would probably be quite a good title for this series.

I only sampled the first two episodes and apparently the series actually adapts 6 classical Japanese literature pieces across it's 12 episodes. As such, I can only really talk about the first of these and overall I enjoyed it. It was pretty miserable though, from what I watched. I dunno, maybe it has a happy ending of some description, but the first two eps aren't exactly a barrel of laughs.

Which isn't a bad thing - it's good to have all sorts of moods in stuff.