“How can I praise you for something stupid like that?!? You pooped in the refrigerator? And you ate all the melonpan?”

In the end, Shakugan no Shana II was like an average NASCAR race. It sounds awesome, there’s a lot of action, fire, and people getting punted into walls, but then you realize you’ve been doing circles for a couple hours and you’re exactly where you started at the beginning.
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What to do when you want to say something about a show where there’s really nothing to be said about it?

Unlike KimiKiss, where I can rant on and on for forever about how Yuumi is going to win lose end up alone turn lesbian for the frog sisters beat the everlasting crap out of Kouichi for being an idiot do something over the last two episodes, and unlike H2O which is really soul-rocking in it’s suck to not-suck conversion, Shana II at this point is pretty straightforward, a show that’s entertaining but not inherently analyzable, kind of like a good action movie.

So what to do when there’s jokes about making babies to be said, complaints to be voiced about Konoe Hecate, and poetic to be waxed about Ike?

The answer: more new features.

Team Zetsubou, which may or may not become a regular feature depending on how lazy and/or utterly insane I am, is a fallback type of humorous episode review / analysis, where everyone’s favorite manic mental characters from the popular dark comedy Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei get wielded as humorous stereotypes to add some flavor and some funny to a post.

All I can really say is that reading it will make more sense than me trying to explain it, although, given the style of the show, it’s doubtful that either makes sense. Still, I hope you enjoy this lighter feature, and until then, enjoy the first trial of Team Zetsubou in reviewing Shakugan no Shana II 22.

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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. (more…)

Looking back…

And now for the Slowpoke news: we’re in the winter season.

I’m still stuck in the past, not because of any traumatic accidents which have permanently scarred me and/or my memory, but because the fall season is arguably a much more robust season than the winter ones, at least in terms of new shows.

Especially for a visual novel slash romance slash restricted rock-paper-scissors fan like me, there were a lot of shows that were very appealing; many of them, despite being in tried and tired genres, brought a lot of fresh concepts to the table.

And what’s interesting about this, is that unlike in the summer season, a lot of the most promising shows didn’t close out at twelve episodes. Those that did, were strong shows, no doubt, but many more than that have been promised at least 20-odd episodes, double the goodness if they can keep the pace up.

As such, the winter watchlist is turning out to be strangely familiar. There are plenty of carryover shows on the list, and those that are new shows to 2008 are mostly sequels in some way or form (Zoku SZS, Minami Okawari). Not to leave a bad impression of the winter season - but there aren’t any names of new shows that really stand out from it.

This doesn’t equate with ‘no good shows’, per se - some of my favorite fall shows have been ones that have been completely off the radar - but going off the blog reactions so far, there hasn’t been a standout show that absolutely blows people away, that came out of nowhere and delivered the awesome. Undoubtedly there probably will be, but for now I’m content with surviving off both fresh old shows, and some true classics that are burning a hole in my DVD collection. Today, I’ll take a look at what we have to expect from some of the shows coming into their second cour in 2008.
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Shakugan no Shana II is a standard action-slash-supernatural romance show revolving around a hardly-normal boy named Yuuji, who secretly harbors a hidden treasure called the Reiji Maigo inside his body. This, combined with his status as a Torch, a sort of copy of a deceased person’s personality, makes him a top target for hunters known as the Guze no Tomogara. It’s up to Shana, a female Flame Haze who fights to keep the balance of the world, to protect him - but could their relationship be something more? Or does Yuuji’s friend Yoshida have something to say about that? Not to mention, a wide array of other main and side characters, including Margery Daw, a far more reckless Flame Haze, Wilhelmina, the Flame Haze with a caring, outspoken personality, and many of Yuuji’s friends from school, who all play roles in the gears of this story.

1/27/08: Episode 15
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1/21/08: Episode 14
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1/16/08 - Episode 13:
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Click here for more information on Track Two.

-CCY

Oh no! It’s the dreaded but ever-popular “here’s what I think about all the new shows in a season that I’ve barely seen an hour of” post!

Perhaps it’s one that can be considered overdone in the anime blogging world, but it certainly serves a purpose. A blogger’s watchlist can say a lot about their tastes and passions, something that can be helpful when getting a concept behind the words. Not to say to form massive stereotypes on bloggers, but at least once you know the general viewing pattern of a person you can know where to turn when you need your fix of genre-specific fandom.

The seasonal review posts that pop up around the first few weeks of a show are also helpful to those of us who actually don’t have the time to watch every first episode individually (major props to those who can; it’s some serious effort just handling half) and need to gauge popular opinion to see what are some of the unknown shows that went previously under the radar.

As such, it’s a little late but it’s time for one more take on what shows suck, what shows don’t, and why you should listen to me instead of everyone else. Most shows have gotten three episodes in by now (look at the title. Ooh, alliteration, exciting, I know) and that seems a fair enough time to get a reading of the series, especially with the projected 12-episode length of many of this season’s shows.

I don’t plan on directly ranking the shows against each other but rather putting them on an overall barometer of just how much hype a show can build in me; whether it’s more likely that I’ll crash the servers looking for the latest release or whether it’ll pop up months later to remind me that it still exists.

If you’re looking for a take on all 30+ shows I would reccomend one of the excellent summaries from somewhere else, but if you want overly biased harem / romance comparisons (plus one or two oddballs; 8 in total)…welcome home, master.

Yeah, I can’t stand that line at all.
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And you always thought that was spring…

Adaptation season may be closer to the truth, as pretty much every show I’ve followed so far is based on an eroge or ren’ai.

This probably says something about the creativity of harem shows nowadays, with probably one completely new romance (Code-E) and one completely new visual novel adaptation (sola) in recent memory, but the content is all fresh to me anyway.

Not to mention, the logistical challenges of adapting premade content still are fairly high, especially with the branching nature of harem-types.

The point still remains that there are a lot of the same shows out there this fall season, and while the moe-bishoujo-hater is probably off cursing somewhere, lovers of either harem, romance, or just general fanservice/moe are having a busy time.

As such it’s time for another triple take, taking looks at three more first episodes, bringing the total to six fall anime so far…
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Having read the light novel a few months ago, the manga a few days ago, and with the second season just getting underway, Shakugan no Shana fever is in full fury.

Perhaps curiosity is a better descriptor, since as much as two manga volumes and one light novel can teach you, one can imagine a gaping hole in the plotline, a huge amount of something missing, that can only be found in sinking large amounts of time and, since we are relatively moralistic around here, money into watching the entire first season of Shana.

There’s no doubt that a show like this can be easily picked up upon in the first few episodes of the sequel, being what seems to be of the general type ‘boy meets supernatural girl, action romance ensues’, but naturally there are a few nuances that are missed here and there, some twists, character development, and in the case of the Shana series, confusing jargon.

Now turning to an hour-and-a-half movie may not be the best way to cover what I presume is a large part of the 12-hour, 24-episode series, but as the cliches go, 1) any port in a storm, and 2) watch first, ask questions later.

What follows is an impression of the Shana movie from a relative newbie to the series; it seems to reprise much of the storyline from the first light novel, so I can’t claim that it’s totally new content, but there certainly will be a lack of comparisons to how the anime handled the same content.

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There are many reasons to adopt a new series. Perhaps it’s a widely popular one, and you’re curious to see what all the fuss is about. Maybe a favorite voice actor, artist, director, writer worked on this series as well. Maybe you read the manga, or played the visual novel, or just read about the series in a press blurb or something and was intrigued. A figurative dart thrown at a wall?

Sometimes, it’s like that, where you walk into a bookstore, and the first thing that catches your eye is that one thing Mikoto keeps raving about.

And so I sat down with the English release of manga and light novel for an hour.

Yeah, English light novel. Is that a first? Not too familiar with even the Japanese scene for that, but I follow the Haruhi light novels religiously and are kind of jealous that another series gets their novels translated. Oh well, there’s always Baka-Tsuki!

Impressions on Shana after the jump.
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