Anime

Clione no Akari: first Impression

Published on July 13, 2017Leave a comment

“Yes, she was … the bullied girl” — but actually this is all about how we two kept watching the bullying and felt really sorry for her but moreso for ourselves for not being able to do anything.

Clione no Akari: bullying is bad mm-okay

This started strong and then it ended because it turned out to be only nine minutes long, which was just long enough to set up the situation but not to do anything about it. And so much misery is heaped upon poor Minori-chan it isn’t funny. Not only is she poor, but she has a weak constitution and her parents are dead, so the rest of the class bullies her. Bullying is not a new subject in anime of course, but it’s unusual to see it as it’s portrayed here; is this an actual bit of social criticism? In my anime? The posters shown above and the ineffectual teacher trying to get anybody to lend Minori a pencil after somebody stole her pencil case during a test seem to hint that this is indeed a more realistic bullying story, not just the usual sob story to make us sympathise with a character.

Clione no Akari: happier days ahead

The nominal protagonists themselves are not that interesting yet. Their dilemma of wanting to help Minori but not wanting to go against the class hierarchy is familiar and relatable. But I think this may have worked better had this been the first half of a normal length episode, rather than having to wait a whole week or more to see what, if anything the two will do to help Minori.

Aho Girl, NTR, Tsurezure Children: First Impression

Published on July 9, 2017Leave a comment

let’s look at three short length manga based series I’ll probably won’t keep following:

Aho Girl: lots of shouting with few jokes

Aho Girl: an idiot girl shouts until her long suffering, abusive childhood friend snaps again and hits her. That’s the joke. Oh, and she likes bananas. Really really likes bananas. But mostly it’s her shouting nonsense until his patience runs out and he puts her in a wrestling suplex. Having read the manga, this formula doesn’t change much but as other characters get introduced it gets extended somewhat, with Yoshiko’s idiocy rubbing of on others. Problem is that it was never particularly funny. The anime might change that but the first episode didn’t impress.

Netsuzou Trap

Netsuzou Trap: NTR is a trash fetish and adding yuri to it doesn’t change much. Two childhood friends go out for karaoke with their respective boyfriends, when the psycho lesbian one starts molesting our protagonist. It’s all abit creepy and unpleasant, not as enjoyable thrashy as Kuzu no Honkai and not as daring either. That actually had people having sex, here there’s only a bit of light anime style groping on the toilet. Had this been a full length episode, there might have been a bit more build-up of why we should care for these people, but now the boyfriends are just cyphers and the two girls not much better.

Tsurezure Children: love vignettes

Tsurezure Children: like Aho Girl based on a four panel gag comic, this one features the love stories of several teenage couples, from the pure to the blatantly cynical. Problem is, with what seemed like a half dozen couples featured in the first episode and no reason to care for any of them, the actual stories are too slight to care about them. Some of them actively pissed me off in fact, like the somewhat rapey student council president forcing the cigarette smoking deliquent into kissing him. Not my humour.

Kakegurui — First Impression

Published on July 9, 2017Leave a comment

A gambling savant joins an academy where gambling is everything to defeat cheating villains who make faces like this when winning:

Kakegurui: villain o-face

Which in turn makes her make a face like this:

Kakegurui: hero o-face

So if you like crazy faces in your anime, this is the series for you. The first episode was a bit boring, too much time wasted on establishing the audience stand-in Blandy McBlandface and a too realistic a card cheat that the blonde villain used. Second episode was much better, with the student council member that likes to collect nails from her opponent being sufficiently crazy to keep up with our hero. The game too lost all precedence of being anything real humans could do, which paradoxically makes it easier to swallow that she figures out the trick in just one game. Kakegurui‘s success will depend on how well it can keep upping the stakes. Each game should be more over the top, each villain should be more satisfactory to see pulled down and each of our hero’s orgasms at winning should be more intense than the last one. Keep that up and I’ll keep watching.

First impression: Koi to Uso

Published on July 6, 2017Leave a comment

When the girl sitting next to him in class thanks him for letting her borrow half his rubber, Nejima Yukari immediately falls in love with her.

Koi to Uso: dweeb falls in love in a country where love is forbidden

Five years later and it’s still the only time he’s talked to her, yet he’s still in love with her. Normally such a deweeb would never pluck up the courage to confess to his crush, but Nejima is working under a deadline. Only a day away from his sixteenth birthday, it’s now or never to confess, because on his birthday the government will assign him his bride. Because this is a slightly alternate Japan, where the anxiety about declining birthrates has made government assignments of marriage into law and love is forbidden!

Koi to Uso: the feeling is mutual

Well, at least his crush reciprocates, having also kept half of the rubber just like he did. So they confess their love just as he gets his notice at the stroke of midnight, setting up the rest of the series.

Having tried the manga on which this is based, I’m not hopeful for this series. The main problem is that the protagonist and his crush both are not that interesting, while the setup is more likely than not to be used as an artificial obstacle for their true love to flower, rather than something that will actually be examined in depth. Japan’s obsession with its birth rate and the unwillingness to actually do something structural about it like say, making immigration easier, strengthening the position of women or even making sure its citizens aren’t worked to death by black companies is irritating enough without it being the gimmick for a mediocre romcom.

Tsuki ga Kirei — final impression

Published on July 2, 2017Leave a comment

As the final episode proper ends, Akane is on the train to her new home, her father having been transferred to another office. It’s spring break, she and Kotarou have graduated from middle school, but she’ll be in another town in another high school two hours away by train. Kotarou is watching the train move out of sight as he reminisces about his first love, while Akane does the same. A bittersweet ending to a romance that week after week had me besides myself with anxiety, shouting at the television whenever one of them screwed things up again, or weeping in relief when things went right. I could have lived with that ending, not knowing how it would’ve turned out in the end, but with strong hints that it might not have lasted. As the credits roll, we get one last shot of the Moon, then fade to white and let the ending song roll.

Tsuki ga Kirei: the moon is beautiful

And yet… Would it be too much to ask to cheat? To have a proper, they lived happy ever after ending for the best, most real feeling romance in anime I’ve ever seen? Sure, first loves don’t last, it’s rare that you meet the love of your life in middle school and stay together all the way through high school, uni and getting a real job. It wouldn’t be realistic in a series that never went for anime clichés, but…

In my family at least, everybody’s first, serious relationship has resulted in marriage or kids. My brother met his girl friend in high school and they’re still together, with two children and a book published. As for long distance relationships, I met my wife online and we spent our first three years shuttling between Holland and england. It can happen. And surely now would be the time for one of those after credits codas the series had been using so well to check up with minor characters? Surely…
Tsuki ga Kirei: perfect ending

Yes. This, this is fine.

Tsuki ga Kirei is my anime of the season and this ending was perfect. It made romance anime relevant again by ditching all the usual cliches, setting the story in middle school rather than high school hence making Akane and Kotarou a little bit younger and more naive than otherwise and refusing to make any of its characters into clichés. Akane may be shy and somewhat anxious, but she is also the star of the track team. Kotarou might be an impressionable Dazai quoting book nerd, but he also likes boxing and he’s not into otaku stuff. Even the incidental characters, like Akane’s friend Aika, have some complexity to them, ie. she’s somewhat brash and loud, but genuinely cares when Akane loses her stress release stuffed toy. Tsuki ga Kirei never stopped moving the romance forward, starting the first episode with the two of them getting curious about each other, having them going out by episode three and out to the world by episode seven, ultimately ending, well, see above. I hope this will inspire other anime romances.

Tsuki ga Kirei: always the bridesmaid, never the bride

Remains only to say something about Chinatsu. Poor, poor Chinatsu. Akane’s best friend who made the unfortunate choice to fall in love with Kotarou just slightly too late to ever have a chance. That moment in episode seven where she sees Kotarou walk hand in hand with Akane, when she tried so hard to get his attention earlier, is heart breaking. She was the best kind of romantic rival, one who actually hurt as she lost, who wasn’t mean or stirred up shit for the sake of it, didn’t try to steal Kotarou, just a girl who struggled hard to reconcile her feelings with her friendship with Akane and ultimately succeeding. I wouldn’t mind an OVA in which she finds her own love as well. She deserves it.