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So, having made a proclamation about doing stuff last Friday, did I carry it through across the weekend?

Well, kinda.

Friday and Saturday were good days - I ploughed through the to do list with a vigour that meant I was ticking off stuff way ahead of schedule. However, Saturday night I was up rather late and the knock on was that Sunday I was pretty tired.

And being tired meant I didn't really maximise my time. There was a bunch of options for stuff to do and I avoided any that seemed like too much effort. Also I kinda blew the entire morning playing compute games.

However, by the afternoon I'd decided I was being silly and so did some scanning. The truth is if I'd properly committed to scanning I could have done loads more, but even so I got through two issues of New Type, which is pretty good going.

Anyway, while I scanned, I watched some fansubs, so here's some mini reviews:


B Gata H Kei

Hmm, this is a weird one.

At the very start of the first episode the main character, a 15 year old girl, declares that it's her ambition to sleep with 100 guys.

Which, if I'm perfectly frank, did not sit well with me. It is worth bearing in mind that the Japanese age of consent works differently to ours. Here there's a single age, above which sex is basically illegal. In Japan I believe it's more like a tiered system, where people between something like 14 and 19 are allowed to sleep with people of a similar age.

So in other words, she's not underage, as such. However, what troubled me more was that no justification for it was given - why does she want to sleep with 100 guys? It makes little sense. Also, if a girl really had this ambition, would she also then be as naive and afraid of actual sex as this one is?

Plus, the show then moves on to essentially being a fairly standard romantic comedy. The fact she says she wants to sleep with 100 guys is almost irrelevant. If instead it had been about her falling for this guy and her continuing clumsy attempts to seduce him then that would have worked perfectly. So why the 100 sex partners crap?

Anyway, if you get past that element, this is actually a fairly okay romantic comedy.


Kiss x Sis

And speaking of bizarre shows, there's Kiss x Sis.

The basic idea of this show is that the main guy has two older twin sisters who both want to jump his bones. However, it's eventually revealed that they're not blood relatives - his father married their mother after they both had their respective children.

One of the main problems I have with a lot of romantic comedy anime is that there's no real reason why the hot chicks like the guy. Many of them just seem to work on assumptions, and this is another one - why do these girls love him? No reason is given.

However, where B Gata H Kei had a weird idea but then proceeded to actually be a fairly normal romantic comedy, this show just knocks that weird ball out of the park for a home run and never looks back. I mean, when it's revealed that they're not blood relatives, the father and mother actually do so with the aim of encouraging them to sleep together.

And in one scene, one of the girls fishes something out of a waste bin in his room and smells it. My assumption as to what's going on is that she's found a tissue he's used to wipe up his 'night-time emissions' and is taking a great big sniff.

No, this isn't a proper hentai anime, it's just very, very wrong.


Magic Kaito

I must confess that I know next to nothing about Detective Conan - or is it called Case Closed? The only things I do know are that the main character is a guy that's been turned into a kid and that he solves crimes.

It turns out that Magic Kaito (Magic Kid) is actually a side-story to Case Closed, and features a character in that show. Given that the Magic Kid in question steals stuff, my guess is that they're enemies.

But in a way this is beside the point. I only found this all out after I'd watched the OAV and I still enjoyed it. I'm not sure my enjoyment was sufficient to instantly rush out and buy Detective Conan, but I'd probably look into it if I didn't have a million other DVDs to watch already.


Tono to Issho

Tono to Issho means something like "my master and me" and appears to originally be a gag manga.

I'm completely unfamiliar with the manga and really didn't know what to expect going into this. My overall reaction is a somewhat mixed one.

Humour is always the most subjective of things and seems to be one of those truly cultural things. The French, for example, love slapstick comedy. This is relevant because Tono to Issho seems to be very Japanese.

And that's not only in terms of its humour - the show is set during the warring states period of Japan, which I have to confess I know very little about. This suggests that a lot of the gags would have more impact if you did know about it, which is to say you were Japanese.

To be fair, I did laugh at some of it, but I also have to say there were some long periods of not laughing, so very much a mixed bag.


Highschool of the Dead

HotD is pure fan service.

I think I've probably blathered on before about how fan-service is actually a fairly broad church, where a lot of people use it simply to refer to tits & ass. Now t&a is fan-service, of course, but fan-service also includes stuff like giant mecha and their transformation scenes or huge space battles and the like.

So when I say HotD is pure fan-service, not only do I mean it has a lot of jiggle, but it's also crammed full of top zombie horror action too.

HotD is actually based on a manga that I like. It's actually one of the very few manga I've read as scanslations, which are normally something I hate, but there didn't seem to be a western release on the horizon and the manga had been on hiatus for a good while, so I checked out the first few volumes.

The anime is faithful in terms of basic plot, but it seems to have added a few bits and pieces. All of these work well, and what also helps is that it's directed and presented in a really nice way. They also don't really skimp on the ultra-violence, although I guess for ratings reasons, some of the more shocking things tend to be just off camera, which doesn't really take anything away.

My only real fear is that because the manga is so short and seems to be a good way off having an end that when it gets to that point of the having to come up with its own end then it'll go off the rails a bit. What I'm hoping though is that the hiatus was because the writer was working with the anime guys to give it a good end.

Luckily, it turns out that this show has already been licensed, so hopefully there won't be too long a wait before it's out on DVD.