Wednesday’s been Koihime Musou night thus far, but bleh, this week brought us an uninspiring episode not even worth discussing. Lu Bu’s first appearance didn’t even raise my pulse an iota. Oh, and Red Hare? He’s a puppy now. A puppy that a loli Dong Zhuo saves from a falling tree.
Right. So.
Instead of wasting my time and trying to yet again screen cap all the panty shots I’ll discuss a show I really like instead. Which O which show could it be? Take a wild guess!
The big way, the big Hokkaido!
The cardinal rule of fiction writing is show, don’t tell. A riveting story doesn’t come out and say the main character felt lonely; instead it shows him or her wandering the streets at night, observing his fellow man in a detached way, pouring affection on a stray cat he or she picks up, and so on. It’s deplorable that most anime shows trample such a golden rule for fear of losing viewers, but hey, catgirls with huge tits and giant exploding robots don’t exactly scream subtlety in the first place, so maybe we ought to cut them slack.
Then a show like Someday’s Dreamers comes along and you’re reminded that the dying art of subtlety has not yet departed the genre.
Someday’s Dreamers is all showing, no telling. This week (episode 04) we follow Gota and how he deals with his first two clients. Again, in any other show, Gota would have sat down next to Sora and soliloquized about how his Mom abandoned him and his father, how learning that he can use magic has brought him nothing but loneliness and misery, and that he’s lost his way. Instead we are treated to images laden with meaning: first Gota eating not one but two of his mother’s bentos while he jokes with friends; later on, he sits in the same spot and munches on a convenience-store bun as his former friends talk of his magical ancestry (and how they believe he lied about it) behind his back. You, the viewer, are left to draw your own conclusion about Gota’s inner state.
All in a day's work at the Mage Academy.
Fortunately for us Gota’s not a dumb effeminate male lead who spends his time moping around. His father may have used magic that Gota has yet to awaken within himself, but even without its help, he intuited exactly the drink that his second client, a woman suffering from breast cancer, wanted. And he surfs in the morning before breakfast!
I do have one nagging question that won’t leave me alone, though: how much do the mages charge per hour? Gota’s first client (a disheveled young man with an equally messy apartment) hired the two mages under the pretext of finding a lost certificate so they would use magic to clean up his apartment while they were at it. Cheaper than a maid, then, I guess. But how many maids are precogs who can lift semis off the ground?
-Mr. K
[...] in case you missed it, I snuck in a brief discussion of Someday’s Dreamers disguised as a Koihime Musou post on Wednesday. I promise this is the last time you hear me ramble about how terrific a show it is. [...]