This Week In Anime (September 21st, 2008)

GIANT NEON FLASHING WARNING: Your weekly Koihime Musou fix is in here! I’ll only be discussing two shows today, but trust me, both of them pulled out quite a few surprising twists heading to home base.

Blade Grasp with 100 Brave = overpowered!

Guh, need to start going to bed early… Next week’s finale week and there’ll be a whole lotta blogging to do!

Introducing… just a blogroll.

To quote Bug-Eyed Earl, no man is an island, but if you duct-tape a bunch of dead guys together they make a decent raft. And so it is with bloggers!

How to get on the blog roll:

1. I’m not a blog hunter scouring the vast expanses of the open Internet looking for acquaintances; I’m mostly content to sit here in my tiny corner of cyberspace and push out posts and reviews on my own like a dedicated worker ant. So please, leave a comment if you read and have a blog of your own, else there’s no way I’ll ever find out about it!
2. Related to the above, RSS feed is an absolute necessity, otherwise I’ll totally forget about you and your site and hence it won’t ever make it to the Blogroll widget.
3. Try to write some half-decent posts. (Do as I say, not as I do…)
4. Hating Suzaku is a sure-fire way to be added nigh-instantaneously, though not a prerequisite.
5. Although I’ve been known to review hentai games for a prominent Internet humor website, I try not to dabble into the ecchi material, even if I sometimes download a show simply because of its completely arresting title. (“Milk Junkies Sisters”. Hentai or thinly-veiled propaganda from Japan’s Dairy Foods Association? Had to find out. Answer: giant boobs galore.)

-Mr. K

Forgiveness please.

For me, setting up a new computer is a happier occasion than Christmas and my birthday rolled together in one, simply because of the potential I can smell in the air, crackling lightning that delights me as I plug in the parts and reinstall all the programs to bring this new beast up to speed.

And a beast ’tis. With 2 terabytes of storage and a 24″ screen, it screams “anime watching station” at me… but it also means I wasted my planned day of writing on Koihime Musou and the rest of the week’s shows. Ah well. I will be back tomorrow, promise.

For the moment, I’m off to fiddle some more with this baby’s guts! Metaphorically speaking, of course. My Saturday nights aren’t that satanic.

Sekirei (episode 12) and the season as a whole.

(Note: the Koihime Musou post is incoming but will have to wait for tomorrow night. Because tonight is…)

Among other things.

O, woe is me! How shall I ever survive in the barren wastelands that is the fall anime season without Sekirei’s plump and nutritious, uhm, morsels to sustain me from now on?

Somehow, I think I’ll manage.

This Week In Anime (September 13th, 2008)

Think I’ll start off by ranting and raving about Code Geass for the umpteenth week in a row? Ha! Let’s shake things up a bit!

Woopsie!

Bonus points if you can identify the anime without glancing at the tags. Clicky clicky for more.

Koihime Musou (episode 10): Southern belles.

A whole lotta talking. That’s what this week’s episode felt like. In fact, the climax of the episode revolves around Zhuge Loliang mounting a spirited defense of Guan Yu against false accusations…

Wait a minute... They all have pink hair... And they're all named Sun... How are we supposed to tell them apart?

… But how, pray tell, did our precious heroines get into such a predicament in the first place? Clicky below if you’re intrigued!

This Week In Anime (September 6th, 2008)

Sekirei (episode 10)

A pimp is Seo.

As if I’m going to miss another episode after last week.

I was indeed expecting another nipple cavalcade but apparently Sekirei is going to play the tease card. Which is fine by me because, for once in its lifetime, I actually felt the plot shrugging awake and stumbling along, thanks to Seo who spends over half the episode explaining every detail of Sekrei’s world for our benefit.

The Cliff’s Notes:

• The capital is separated in four sectors each ruled by a Big Boss. The Big Boss of the North sector is the landlady. Hard to believe, I know… Until you see her spank Tsukiumi.
• Speaking of everyone’s favorite Water Girl: in the world of Sekirei, no one is truly defeated until they are naked as the day they were born. I bet the high school chess club matches must be really intense.
• Why is Sekirei so terrified of resorting to action and fighting? The fight scenes ain’t amazing but they’re still a hundred times better at adrenaline-pumping than the remaining 95% content the show regurgitates every week. Hell, Musubi has a cool ground punch near the end that almost made me mutter “fuck yeah”. Almost.

Code Geass (episode 21)

YES YOUR FRUITY MAJESTY!

Incoming wall o’ text. You’ve been warned.

Whenever a show tackles the issue of collective consciousness and a pan-human melding thereof, the comparisons to Neon Genesis Evangelion and its controversial ending arise, with most commentators failing to address the questions that matter the most.

The Emperor’s all-encompassing plan was to use the Sword of Akarakaksha to initiate the Ragnarok Junction, thereby affecting the collective consciousness and forcing it — through the use of two immortal Codes — to revert to a primal, individual-less entity. Individuals are nothing but masks of that collective unconsciousness, C.C. claims, windows into the larger hive mind’s heart and soul, if you will.

In Code Geass it is Lelouch who rises up to reject that decision, and thank God it didn’t take him two drawn-out, poorly-animated black and white introspective episodes to get there, if you know what I mean. And you have to love that Lelouch doesn’t just yell “GARRR!” and punches Daddy’s lights out: no, he argues against his parents’s intellectual position. He believes that the lies and the deception that they disdain so much are tools with no intrinsic moral value whatsoever. You can cheat on your wife and lie, but you can also buy her a sweet gift for her birthday and hide it from her while waiting for the perfect moment to present itself. Removing individuality would remove not just conflicts but all possibility of healthy, caring interactions.

Hokay, enough Heideggering around. This is the kind of episode that makes or breaks a show if it airs too early; in Code Geass’s case, I doubt many viewers will be put off by the preposterous turn into metaphysics the show took for the week, although it was still a massive disappointment to me. All that build-up over two seasons over the Emperor and his secretive plan? Bam, gone. The Emperor? Gone. Lady Marianne? Gone after a mere two episodes. V.V.? The lil’ bastard is loooong gone. And what in blazes can Schneizel pull out of his ass that’s going to top the Emperor’s plan of forcing the entire species onto a higher plane of consciousness by erasing individuality? Much like a twelve-year-old boy who’s stumbled on his older brother’s Playboy stash, I wonder if Code Geass hasn’t fallen prey to premature climaxing.

And that’s… pretty much it

Uhm, damn. Less overtime, more anime watching. I am hopelessly behind in watching all my favorite series except for those above and Macross Frontier and Koihime Musou. Not only that, but I’m cooking up a “shows I wanna watch” post too, which does not bode well considering my lack of spare of time. Ah, what I wouldn’t give for a Geass that let me forsake sleep entirely…

-Mr. K

Koihime Musou (episode 09): KUMA!

Nope, not a World Destruction reference! Instead it’s a reference to… Well, to an actual bear, and not to a diminutive, alcoholic, eyepatched teddy bear adventurer.

Kuma na no da!

Yeaaaaah. Aren’t you dying to know how that came to pass? Clicky clicky!

Sekirei (episode 09): Out come the big guns.

I skipped watching Sekirei last week and didn’t think twice about it. Earth-shattering developments? In Sekirei? Come on! I might as well expect Musubi to start debating the nuances of the ontological argument or Misato’s nose to stop bleeding every other scene.

And yet I was wrong. Dead wrong. The most shocking turn of events of the entire summer anime season took place during that one episode of Sekirei that I missed! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

Nipples.

(They’re nipples. I hope the NSFW warning goes without saying. Said warning includes everything after the break too. What, I’m gonna hold back and not post screenies? Like hell I won’t!)

This Week In Anime (August 30th, 2008)

Mmmmm… the smell of the impending fall season has me so excited I almost forgot to watch the summer shows! Not that they’re all worthless, but if I can be brutally honest for a minute, aside from Someday’s Dreamers and Antique Bakery, the summer season has brought us little more than moe heroines tripping over their shoelaces for comic effect and buckets of bouncing boobs (now there’s an arresting image).

OH SNAP. Bismarck dishes out the burns like they're on sale!

More after the break, as usual, dear reader!