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The other show I finished yesterday was ef – a tale of melodies. Ugh.

ef – a tale of memories, the series that precedes melodies, was all around okay, and ended rather strongly. I was primarily interested in it because it was the first eroge adaptation Shaft had done after the most dangerous Akiyuki Shinbo joined forces with them, and started mixing shit up. Sure, they had done things like Popotan, but post-Shinbo Shaft is all about Art with a capital A, and I wanted to see this studio’s take on the tried and true genre that is “visual novel adaptation.”

Sadly, Shinbo wasn’t the director of memories–some guy called Shin Oonuma was. He did pretty decently with memories, but the show had way too many outer glows and cloud filters for my tastes. I figured by melodies he would have improved, but… no.

The main thing that kills melodies however is not its directorial strangeness, but its terrible writing. The writing in memories wasn’t stellar, and quite frankly it bored me half of the time, but it wasn’t all that bad. All of melodies is relentlessly boring. The plotlines are also incredibly lazy–they expect you to feel for these characters for no reason at all, then meander for a bit, and finally come to an asinine end. It doesn’t help that Oonuma and crew try to distract you from the lazy writing by chopping everything up and mixing it together, forcing you to piece together these clichéd narratives on your own.

When the show wasn’t killing me with its poor writing, Oonuma’s overuse of strange and inconsistent imagery made the show really difficult to watch. Now, as any long time reader of this blog will know, I love strange imagery in my anime. I’m a big fan of Hideaki Anno’s work on Eva, and I love everything Akiyuki Shinbo directs. However, whenever those directors get weird, the weirdness is unified, focused, and never overstays its welcome. Oonuma’s crew saw it fit to use every single cool visual style they could think of, which lead to a production that looked not dissimilar to a kid’s first time in Photoshop. I did appreciate the wide variety of animation styles and visuals on display, but they never meshed and the entire thing came off as amateur.

All that said, there was one part that I liked about this show, and it was Kuze’s struggle. Most people got sick of him, but I found his inner battles to be quite compelling. It’s too bad it was all brought down by Oonuma’s shotgun approach to “artistic” directing. Oh well.

This post will have some spoilerific Ga-Rei -zero- rambles, so read with caution.

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More of my time at Seiya’s house. I changed the recording setting in this one because I thought it’d make things sound better, but they actually sound worse, so I apologize in advance for the terrible audio quality. The content is pretty good though, especially Seiya’s Gainax spy story.

Anyway, discussion topics include:

• Morning Musume
• Trader Vic’s
• Saaya Irie
• Fakku
• HD DVD
• Fist of the North Star
• Boys love
• Gainax
• Spot the prostitute

Visuals Aids

• Old Gainax building
• New Gainax building sekrit spy shots

Guests

• Seiya
  

Songs

• Opening Song– “Kikaku Mono AV no Onna” by Tokusatsu
• Ending Song– “Go My Way” by Eriko Nakamura

Those with a keen eye on the ever flowing stream of pirated anime may notice that a curious torrent has appeared. It is a most sadistic little collection of files, containing the first thirty-nine episodes of the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam series. Where are the last four episodes, you ask? They’re sitting on my harddrive, as R2 DVD rips. I am perfectly content with watching these last four episodes raw, and then sharing them as AVIs, but it sure would be neat to see them translated!

So, I am putting out a call for translators– if you like Gundam and know Japanese, please help me in putting out these last few episodes. It’d make you a super-cool person.

edit: Seiya has just brought some anonymous fansubs to my attention. I think I’ll just torrent them and be done with it!

HERE IS ALL OF FIRST GUNDAM

maybe I’ll finish it this week, finally.

You’d think that after watching one whole season of this junk, one would eventually give up and spend their time on more worthwhile endeavours. However, my common sense is forever broken, and I somehow just found myself at the end of the second season of Rosario + Vampire.

Though, to be fair, this season wasn’t nearly as bad as the first one. For most of season two the writers let loose and just threw together whatever asinine ideas they had together into a script. This actually proved to be quite entertaining; almost on a ToLoveRu level. With the writing as batshit insane as it was, I could tolerate the often times shoddy animation, and the sometimes overbearing censorship. The odd panchira did help.

What really fucked them up was the end. As is typical in these sorts of shows, whenever the 13 episode mark creeps up, the writers scurry to come up with a dramatic ending. I don’t mind this if done well, but in Capu 2 they came up with one of the most shallow endings ever. Of course they try to cover up just how shallow it is with some total BS dialogue, but in the end it’s terribly shallow. I realize it’s rather silly to complain about shallowness in a fanservice show, but they went too low for me.

It’s quite sad that Gonzo fucked this show up, since I typically like fanservice shows. Hell, I buy some of them. I buy the R2 releases of some of them. Where these shows succeed or fail lies entirely in execution, and my standards are low. ToLoveRU, while entirely disposable, is a really fun show that I’d recommend anyone watch at least once. Zero no Tsukaima has a wonderful cast of characters, and the writing along with the production values make it worth buying. Rosario + Vamprie, on the other hand, is just so poorly done that, in the end, it doesn’t even deserve your time. Well, maybe certain episodes in season two are worth watching, but on the whole I can’t recommend this show to anybody. If Gonzo lives to make a season three, I am most certainly skipping.

All that said, this guy was a badass.

My awesome parents got me a neat 8GB Insignia Pilot mp3 player for Christmas, and the thing’s working great. I’ve never had the pleasure of walking around with music blaring in my ears, and now that I have I can understand why I always run into so many detached looking teens with tiny little earbugs plugged into their skulls.

My main issue right now is with regards to playlists. I use iTunes to organize my songs, and I can’t sync from there since iTunes hates not-iPod devices. This isn’t really a problem, since I’ve found a neat little program that converts iTunes-generated xml playlists to wpl playlists for Windows Media Player, which is able to sync with my player. Now the problem lies in WMP, which is just… frustrating. Not as frurating as Rhapsody however, which crashed every 5 seconds. WMP is annoying because it assumes the user is a log and attempts to transfer every single mp3 on your computer on to your device. I know it’s just trying to be nice, but it’s a pain. I’m assuming this can be fixed, but wrangling with WMP is a pain.

There’s another issue with playlists, and that’s on the side of the device itself. When I turn the shuffle feature off, it seems as if the playlist on the device does not retain the organization of the songs, and just organizes them in alphabetical order. This isn’t a huge problem, since I don’t really mind skipping through songs on a shuffled playlist to find what I want to listen to.

All I can do is write negatively, but I’m actually really happy with this. I figure it’ll last me two years– that is, until I’m out of college and employed so I can buy myself a more badass device.

edit: this post is pointless now since I’ve fixed all the problems w

Pictured:

• Gurren Lagann PART I w/ box and core drill
• Reading lamp
• Zero no Tsukaima
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
• Toki Wo Kakeru Shoujo SE
• Insignia MP3 player
• Yokai Attack! (review copy)
• Black Lagoon s2 vol 1 SE
• Karin vol 4

Not Pictured

• 190 US dollars in COLD HARD CASH
• Two pairs of pants

All of my Nanoha DVD cases are shattered, but the discs are fine. The cover slips are kind of torn, but it isn’t that bad. If I could just get my hands on new cases I’d be cool. Anyone know where they sell clear DVD cases?

The MP3 player doesn’t have enough room for my anison playlist, but I hardly listen to every single song on there anyways. I’m planning to just load it up with a bunch of OSTs along with some non-anime JP bands, and use what space is left over for the top 100 or so anison I’m currently into. Not like I get out and about much anyways, but at least I’ll be able to listen to AWO on long car rides.

Overall, a really good haul. I got everything I wanted…

…except for a new laptop, but that was just wishful thinking. I just forced my parents into buying me a new PC six months ago…

Original Post

I really wanted this bad boy to go up on Saturday, but I just couldn’t swing it. See, I was busy working on the comic project that my friend commissioned me to do, and I was hell bent on getting it out before Christmas. I’ve since finished it, and it’ll probably be available for people to see in some form… soon^TM. For those who don’t know, it’s a SFW Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu doujinshi. Story is, my friend offered me cash to do a comic for his anime club. I agreed, and decided to make a Haruka doujinshi. While it was a lot of work, it was a very rewarding experience. Though, I kind of feel like a dick because it took money to push me into making a doujnshi, but I’ll probably make more on my own now, and they will be terribly dirty. Terribly.

Anyway, on to this current comic. First of all, the de-Tomino’d version is available here. It is very much not safe for work. Yes, in the great tradition set forth by Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, I used a bald man to cover up naughty bits. Since Maeda wasn’t available, I used someone just as–if not more–crazy. I guess Keep Out tape would have been more characteristic of Chocotto Sister, but the image of Tomino’s screaming face over a loli’s DFC is just too funny.

The script is based off of this comic’s VERY FIRST Christmas comic, which you can find if you look through the archives hard enough. It’s kind of lazy on my part, but in the end I think it’s also pretty funny. I did the art for this all on one giant sheet of paper to help me size the characters in their panels better, and I liked how it turned out. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a nice way to work. I usually draw characters on different sheets of paper, and combine them all into one comic on the computer. This way is fine, but sometimes it hurts to make detailed drawings really small when resizing for comic composition.

I guess now I’ll backtrack and talk briefly about the last few comics, since I haven’t done that yet. I really like how the art in the CHAOS;HEAD comic came out, even if it’s not perfect. The comic really could have ended at panel three, but I needed to fit a meme and a Newtype flash in. Because Mistakes of Youth is actually a Gundam prequel doujinshi, and Rets is Char Aznable’s ancestor. Really.

The two somewhat Shinbo centric comics were made to kind of loosen me up, since I was stuck in a boring scripting routine, so I wanted to mix things up. I also wanted to throw Anonymous for a loop, so they would stop posting my comic and saying, “NO IT’S ‘WHOSE EYES ARE THOSE EYES YOU FAG’ GOD.” If you start to notice comics being more off the beaten path than usual, that’s because I’m trying to broaden my horizons. Two kids walking around and talking about anime is fine, but I want to channel the kind of spirit present in the opening comics more.

I really liked the artwork in the Giant Robo parody comic, and have no qualms about that one at all. I like the script for THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SHINBO but the artwork came out bad. I tried for realism and failed. Oh well.

But enough blogging, and back to Christmas. Happy Holidays, motherfuckers!

Before I get underway, I’d like to note that I have very little idea as to what I’m talking about. My contact with Real Japanese Otaku is limited only to this one guy I talked to when I was 13, and this random girl on Mixi who is more of a Shounen Jump reading fujoshi than anything else. I do however have the power of fanart, popularity surveys, and the slightly retarded cries of English speaking fans on my side, so hopefully my rantings will have some bearing on what’s actually going on. THE TRUTH, if you will.

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed something most peculiar. It is a tendency amongst anime fans to prefer characters who come off to me as naggy, annoying and generally not very attractive personality-wise. I’m talking about characters like Kagami (Lucky Star), Hinagiku (Hayate no Gotoku!), Kyou (Clannad), Asuna (Negima!) and hell, Asa (Shuffle!). These characters tend to be tomboyish, naggy, and some of them are pretty generic and poorly handled tsundere girls. I don’t like these sorts of characters, as they posses traits which are not desirable to me as an otaku. However, these characters are wildly popular amongst the majority of otaku, and I have really difficult time understanding why.

As an otaku, aren’t you supposed to embrace fantasy? Where’s the fantasy in girls who are, more or less, like girls you’d run across in the real world? What’s attractive about a girl with the personality of a boy?  Similarly, what’s attractive about a girl who punches you straight into sky in order to hide her feelings, instead of telling you straight out that she likes you? I’ve asked people why they like such characters, and time and time again they can never give me a straight answer. The typical answers are, “you just don’t understand” or “well, she has a nice seiyuu.” My friends, these are not reasons. These answers are what we call “dodging the issue”, with the issue being wholly unpleasant personality traits.

I have a theory– these fans are terribly shallow people who like these characters just for their designs. How many times have you heard about a guy sticking with an unpleasant girl simply because she was hot? It’s a sad story, and unfortunately such a mindset has now manifested in otaku culture.

My friends, my brothers, my sisters, I beg of you; don’t be fooled! This is all a conspiracy by The Industry to turn us into normal people! Don’t let them have their way! Embrace the few shreds of sanity left in otaku entertainment! Embrace the loli! Embrace the doting childhood friend! Embrace otaku girl! These are all characters you should like! Don’t you want to stand proud and say, “Yes! I love Kaede because she loves Rin unconditionally and would do anything for him” or “I love Nagi because she can name every single Zeon MS without breaking a sweat” as opposed to finding ways to hide your horribly shallow personality by saying this character “has a good seiyuu.”

It’s not too late for salvation, my friends!