Posts tagged Gurren Lagann

My Show Is Better Than Your Show, March Madness Edition

There seems to be cries every season about how the cropping of shows is worse than the last, and while this may or may not be true depending on your taste in shows, I’ve always found it hard to be lacking in stuff to put up on the screen every night. This is because while there may not be many standout, my-God-I-need-to-watch-this-now shows in every season there are always plentiful bounties of sleeper hits, things worth trying because someone said it was good, or just plain old shows, enough to ensure that I get continually buried deeper and deeper in a pile of anime I need to catch up on.

Perhaps a large part of it is due to the fact that I enjoy being very easily influenced and thanks to that I can pick up random shows if two or three people say it’s actually pretty good – doubly so if they can nail a weak spot of mine – combined with the fact that I really haven’t seen much, having only been in the anime-watching business for just over a year.

To prove that anime Is Out There – cue the X-Files theme – I’m going to spend a little time tonight going over the majority of my watchlist, instead of the huge specialty posts on a single anime which have been written recently. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s mostly code for “I want to talk about True Tears, Clannad, and Shana II but am too lazy to unify it in an easy way” with some bonus laughing at other shows added in.

Since it’s March and all and I like to pretend to be hip and knowledgable about sports (Protip: Motorsports yes, sportssports no.), it’s a super special sweet sixteen – ow, my manliness – March Madness-type organization with, you guessed it, sixteen shows on the list. There are in reality a few more but the majority of the extra would consist of “I saw this once, and would kind of keep watching it if there were nothing else to watch,” which explains itself well enough.

To be fair it doesn’t have the mass-voting aspect or the actual sports-related references of the other March Madness anime posts, but, hey, 16 anime, that’s a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Playing Catch-Up: The Alternate Universe Winter Season

 
(I’m just amazed I didn’t go straight to my Kanon folder for ‘winter pics’)

There’s been some muttering about the winter season being a bit slower than the previous fall, or even summer, with most of the big-name blockbusters being either continuations from seasons past or straight sequels (or sequel-like substances, etc) … or, y’know, licensed.

As such it’s been tricky trying to fill the ever-demanding viewing schedule with new and exciting things, especially for someone that is closed-minded in anime genre; in terms of visual novels, the winter 2008 season is kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, with H2O, which has been underwhelming so far, and True Tears, which, is, y’know, licensed.

There are many things that could and are being done to remedy this situation: for one, cracking open that stash of KimiNozo / Rumbling Hearts gaining dust somewhere, or two, rewatching an old classic like Cardcaptor Sakura, or simply just staring at the mailbox waiting for Ever17. But rather, I figured I’d do something interesting and likely painful, and give a shot a bunch of random shows from random genres that people have been praising over the months; the kind of shows that get demands to be, y’know, licensed.

As such the last three days have kind of been like a strange icebreaker, or walking around at a party, or something, as I’ve been stepping from one first episode to the next in rapid succession, shaking hands with musicians, genius delinquents, little girls, littler girls, and giant robots. It’s certainly been an interesting exploratory experience, and on the whole it’s been one that’s positive. None of the shows really turned me off, although I would only really actively watch one or two of them. (The obligatory gag is falling a bit dead here, but I feel I have to say…y’know, licensed.)

What follows after the jump is a bunch of twenty-five-minute impressions of five quite acclaimed (or, at the least, talked about) shows from the eyes of someone who has no idea who, why, or what is going on; let it be an exercise in snobbish snickering for the veterans, or perhaps, an eye-opener to a series some of you dismissed blindly. Read the rest of this entry »