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2013: Nico Nico Gatchaman! #12DaysOfAnime (5)

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2013 was the year of the Nico.

A strange year for me personally. The long time assignment I’d been on at one boring Dutch bank finished in March and it would take until August before my next assignment, at the same boring Dutch bank. Which meant I spent almost half a year getting paid but underemployed, being stuck at home with nothing to do but play video games. Which sounds nice, but not so much when dealing with the anxiety of finding a new assignment but getting rejected over and over again. I still wasn’t watching anime regularly at the time, but I was getting curious about it, looking for something that I had already found in games like Mass Effect, but not enough off.

Slice of moe anime never came as mellow as Non Non Biyori, a series about four school girls way out in the sticks, where school is one single class and the greatest entertainment comes from going to that one konbini store on the other side of the mountains. The setting was beautiful, the girls were funny, the mood was relaxing. A perfect anime to unwind with. Yama no Susume was similar, a short length series of two childhood friends reuniting in high school and going mountain climbing. Yuyushiki was a more traditional high school club sort of series, but incredibly funny, while Aiura was another short length series and incredibly horny. We also got a new series of Tamayura, Tamayura: More Aggressive.

Gatchaman Crowds was a very well done attempt to update the venerable Gatchaman franchise, first broadcast in the seventies. We still have transforming heroes fighting space monsters, but things aren’t so black and white anymore. When I first saw it, I argued that it is a classic Hegelian dialectic masquerading as a manic pixie dream girl rom-com. The traditional role of the Gatchaman as masked fighter protecting a passive public versus the internet utopian idea of the people helping themselves by the judicious use of social media. The latter looking a bit naive in 2019 to be honest. What also set this series apart was the great music. The opening theme above is great in itself, but if you’ve watched the show the Gatchaman theme is now stuck in your head.

Kyousougiga was a strange series about a magical “mirror capital” hidden set in Kyoto, based loosely on one of the oldest comics still existing. It started out as one shot net animation, directed by one of Toei Animation’s up and coming young directors, Matsumoto Rie, got a few follow-up ONAs and then a full length anime series. It’s strange and hard to describe, full of Japanese mythology and the like, all remixed and reworked, but at heart it is about family and how to find your way back to them. Beautifully animated, this is perhaps the best series of the year and that’s high praise.

Because let’s not forget that 2013 was the year of Kill La Kill, Attack on Titan and Love Live, three titles that would help define the rest of the decade. The first proved that Trigger was a worthy heir to Gainax, the second was the greatest ‘breakout’ anime of the decade, bigger even than Sword Art Online was the year before and Love Live well and truly established idol fandom in the west. Other influential series include Yowamushi Pedal, the biking sports anime that would provide to be a big hit with the boys’ love crowd. Though not as big a hit as the money maker KyoAni stumbled on: Free. The advantage of a swimming sports anime about a cycling sports anime is that in the former, your hot boys can be topless throughout. The ending theme made no bones about what its main attraction was…

Good series this year I haven’t seen yet include baseball drama Diamond no Ace, superhero thriller Samuari Flamenco, teenage angst fest Aky no Hana and nerd drama Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!: No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! I tried, but that particular series is so cringeworthy it makes me die from secondhand embarassement. I literally had to turn it off when she tries to sneak past her classmates in disguise because it hurt to watch any further. Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru was somewhat similar in that regard, in that it hit far too close to home for me, but it was just bearable enough I kept watching.

Hataraku Maou Sama is a reverse isekai: the demonic overlord of a fantasy world is cast out of it into modern day Japan and has to make a living working as a part timer at “MgRonalds”, while his sidekick does the house work. Little do they know the hero who banished them, Emilia, is also in Japan. Epic battles … do mostly not occur. Instead, it’s a comedy harem show that really needs a second season.

151 shows this year in my library; 82 seen in total. Shows I liked not yet mentioned: Symphogear G (determination to punch fist), the first Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya (my first Fate show), Ghost in the Shell: Arise, Coppelion (radio active proof girls go exploring irradiated Tokyo), Love Lab (inexperienced ojo-sama and tomboy explore romance together), Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi, Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko (otaku harem show), Gj-Bu (otaku harem show), Tamako Market, Kotoura-san (esper meets pervert and falls in love because he accepts her) and OreShura (an otaku harem show). 2013 had a lot of harem shows it seems like. I mention them because when I’d seriously started watching anime, two years later, that staple diet after I’d branched out from the science fiction action genres I used to watch.

This is day five of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2014: when Metafilter made me watch Aldnoah.Zero

Best anime of the season — First Impressions

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If you haven’t done so yet, go watch the first episode of Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo so you can appreciate the clip below in its full glory:

Sex in anime usually is done on the same level as a raunchy eighties comedy, utterly incapable of any thought beyond “boobs are awesome”. Cheap tittelation and fan service is everywhere but it’s frustratingly rare for anime to move beyond that. I didn’t have high hopes for Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo because its MAL description made it sound like just another ecchi comedy. Which it is, but what I didn’t realise it was one written by Okada Mari. She always delivers something interestingly and it’s the same here. This series has the most honest depiction of puberty, sex and the attraction to it and fear of it I’ve ever seen in anime.

and drank every last drop of the sweet juices pouring forth from her

Not series start by having one of the main characters narrate a description of eating out a girl, to the mixed reception of her fellow Literature club members. While Sonezaki the club president is revulsed by it, the narrating girl herself, beautiful and melancholy Sugawara wants to experience sex for herself. Of the other three members, the stoic Hongō is writing eroica herself and sees all this as reserve, while the main protagonist Onodera and her shy friend Sudō are both fascinated and embarassed by it. Onodera may or may not have a crush on her childhood friend, who has grown up to be a popular football player at their high school, with his fan girls giving Onodera a hard time for even talking to him.

Samurai hair

She herself though keeps seeing the dorky boy she grew up with, still fascinated by trains and thinks he’s just grown bigger, hasn’t changed. She just cannot see him in a sexual light. That is, until one night she goes over to bring some leftovers her mother had made for him and runs into him, well not watching videos of trains anymore… Childhood friend discovers her crush’s hidden porn stash is an anime cliche of long standing, but I can’t think of any series in which she walked in on him having a wank. And he’s actually watching online porn, meaning anime finally caught up with the late nineties. His response, her response, the music playing through it and her final denial on the railroad bridge with the train going underneath between her legs: it’s all perfect.

This is my anime of the season.

Why you should’ve watched Hitori Bocchi

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Pefect comedic timing.

Every episode of Hitori Bocchi managed to make me laugh at least once, which is not always the case with adaptations of comedy manga series. It’s easy for the transition from four panel manga gag to animation to fall flat, to get that timing wrong, but Htori Bocchi delivered week in, week out. The clip above shows that perfectly. You know exactly what’s coming, you know that Aru will botch that serve, but despite that it’s still funny because it gets the buildup and timing exactly right.

It also works because it fits in with Aru’s character to flub it so badly. She’s the type of person to want to present herself as perfect, but unfortunately ends up failing miserably most of the time. But she doesn’t let this get her down, she keeps doing her best and even has her own theme tune to sing to cheer herself up(the full version of which was released as a single). She’s far out my favourite character of this series that’s full of likeable characters. Apart from Aru there’s the blonde ‘yankee’ Sunao Nako, who frightens their home room teacher who is sure she’s some sort ogf juvenile deliquent. There’s Sotoka Rakitā, the obligatory foreigner with strange ideas about Japan, who came to the country to look for ninjas. And then there’s the protagonist herself, Hitori Bocchi, who suffers from an incredibly amount of social anxiety to the point that she thinks her friends will forget her if she stays home sick for a day.

Bocchi’s social anxiety is what drives the series. It all started when she graduated from elementary school and her only friend turned out to go to a different middle school. Worse, she said they could no longer be friends until Bocchi had befriended her entire class. So Bocchi does the only logical thing: trying to cancel her class, because if she’s the only one in it, she’s technically fullfilled the quest. When that doesn’t work, she sets out to make friends and ends up with Nako, Aru and Sotoka. Her attempst to make and keep her friends are both adorable and hilarious and a lot of the humour revolves around how her social anxiety makes her over react. It’s never mean spirited though; Bocchi’s fears are taken seriously, it’s just the way that she reacts that makes it funny. What’s more, she has the support of her friends. Which is one more reason why this was the series that I wanted to watch first each week last season.