The “12 Days of Christmas” series is a joint feature by some members of the Anime Blogging Collective recognizing twelve moments, twelve series, or just twelve things about anime that we’ve enjoyed over the past year, that really make us enjoy loving what we do, and that is being an anime fan. Feel free to join in the list-making fun too if you wish. We hope you enjoy this feature.

It’s been one heck of a year of anime watching; especially for my first real year of true fandom.

There were the funny moments, the head-chopping ad infinitum, the gung-ho bread ladies.

There were the dramatic moments, the silence against a sky background, the stunning developments at the school festival, the climatic battle in school at night.

There were the sweet moments, the happy ending for a magical girl and her lover.

There were the touching moments, the feelings of a cat-eared maid, the romantic epiphanies of a god princess.

There were the stunning moments, the battle between two data entities, the revelations of a spurned lover on her hospital bed, the story of the girl in the cage.

But there were two emotions I can say that I never really felt this year in regards to anime.

The first would be a sense of wasted time. Yes, it would be too optomistic, even for me, to say that all the anime this year were equally great. Clearly there were some that stood above the others, and for those shows to do that, they had to be standing on the shoulders of the lesser.

But the worst it ever got in a show was not anger, but merely dissapointment. Dissapointment that a show didn’t live up to its full potential. Every show had a moment, had a scene, had a fleeting period where it, too, was a great. Where it was at its finest. It was longer for some shows than others, yes, but when picking out one moment for each show, I had no trouble at least picking one spot where I can genuinely say I smiled or laughed.

The other emotion would be true sadness, and that’s something, in my near-masochistic manner, that distresses me a bit more. I’ve watched many a sad show, seen many a tearful moment, in this year.

Yet most of the time, it only warranted a deep sigh. Perhaps a melancholy introspective, an uncomfortable glance away from the screen, maybe watery eyes like I had just yawned.

In thirty-plus anime this year, I cried once.

AIR 12.
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Long long ago, in a time far removed from now, I wondered what the hell ‘gao’ meant after seeing it brought up on a message board.

The answer, as things always tended to be at the time, resided at Youtube, where I found out that ‘gao’ had something to do with stegosauruses and something to do with some show called AIR. With nothing better to do on a January weekend, might as well watch it and see what it’s about.

12 days, 12 episodes, and a few manly tears later, anime, to me, was back for good.

Although in really pixelated, low-res Youtube quality. Ironically enough, the licensing of AIR was one of the factors spurring me to begin watching fansubbed anime the ‘real’ way, through downloads and torrents.

However, I’m not stupid enough to do something blatantly illegal (only gray area, eh, but that’s a different story) and brag about it on a blog, and so I often turn to the anime market in the U.S. to support the industry and rewatch shows that perhaps I don’t have backed up.

For those reasons the arrival of the first volume of AIR in the mail was a sentimental moment, something that really worried me about watching the series again.

Being the first anime series I watched since D.N.Angel in 2004, AIR set the bar for all the other shows to come. And it set it high.

But undoubtedly, there were shows that came along and knocked over the bar like it was nothing. Shows that went beyond ‘really good’ into, well, ‘defining’.

As such it worried me that, coming back to AIR, the ‘first love’ period would have worn off and what we’d have left is a very rushed, emotionally blunt (i.e. “cry now plz ;_;”) anime. And if there’s one thing I could say about the first four episodes, it’s that I sure criticized them a lot.
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Another new miniseries here, dealing with something that seems to be far too common among the anime community, and that is comparisons. Why isn’t Series X more like Y? Series Z is such a rip off of series S. Series W set the bar, and A, B, and C don’t come close to matching the original. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

Now, the question here is: are those comparisons justified? Are the claims of copying fact or fiction? It’s time to put that to the test.

First up to the line is a pair of series that at least to me seem rather similar, and maybe justifiably so - the story of sola was written by Naoki Hisaya, a man who worked on Kanon as well, so there certainly is reason for a lot of Key-sounding stuff to happen. But, AIR and Kanon are pretty dissimilar on their own, so that shouldn’t be a reason for too many similarities.

But you never know. There are many things which sola and AIR have in common. You might be surprised. (By the way, huge ending spoilers and whatnot for sola and AIR after the jump)
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