Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

2007 was really fucking uneven. The first few months got by on the better titles that carried over from 2006, but between April and August it was something of a wasteland. I managed to get my fix for good modern anime by way of genius works such as Gurren Lagann and Hayate no Gotoku, but all the other offerings during that period of time where somewhere between mildly amusing to plain bad. Thankfully, August saw the debut of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and Zero No Tsukaima 2, both of which restored my faith in the industry somewhat. October once again impressed with Minami-ke, Kaiji and Clannad.

What follows will be something similar to my monthly posts, but for the Year In Review, I’ll be ordering things by quality using letter grades, starting from the worst to the VERY BEST. I cover a lot of shows in the post, but it’s not everything I watched during the year.

Here’s my rankings.

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Original Post

First comic of ‘08! It looks kind of bad! It’s not totally horrible, but it’s not totally good, either. I do like Tina’s yandere face in panel 4, though. After reading this comic over and over, I realized that it’s actually just this comic + this comic. Oops. This comic plays up the slowly developing insanity in Tina. Normally she’s a cheerful fangirl with pretty well rounded opinions on things, but if you hung around Rets as much as she does, certainly you’d have instances where you’d crack. Rets, however, is smarter than he looks, and knows how the right time to exit. He should thank his lucky stars he’s not dead on the floor. Yet.

The severe lack of Nagi doujins out of C73 is a problem, though. I let last Comiket off since the show was just beginning, so naturally I assumed there wouldn’t be a good turn out. But now the show is almost over, we are lacking in high quality Nagi porn! What is with the fixation on Hinagiku, huh? Tell me, Japan! Actually, I’m sure Japan would tell me to stop whining and just go over there to buy the things myself. Which I would like to do. Eventually. I may do a comic around that idea for next week, but it’s not really fully planned out, yet. In any case, I am in despair. To console myself I’m downloading older Hayate doujins, hoping they will be of Nagi. It’s fine, but I want stuff that’s FRESH. FRESH, NEW AND WELL DRAWN. Sigh. Comiket, I will take you on. One of these days.

New season has started, and as usual, I’m not watching the first episode of everything like every other blogger. I am a discerning individual, and can tell just from promotional art whether or not a show will be for me or not. My judgment has rarely done me wrong, so I’m fine with not watching everything. I have watched some things though, those two things being Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and Rosario + Vampire. I won’t say much here, since I’m reserving my thoughts for a blog post that may or may not happen. I will say that SZS 2 is more of the same except with better animation and the style may be a bit more off-beat and wacky. Rosario + Vampire is a stupid fanservice show, but provided Gonzo doesn’t fuck up the animation, I could watch that for 13 episodes. As of right now currently looking forward to subs of Minami-ke ~okawari~, Gunslinger Girl 2, and the end of Sky Girls (I need to finish my year in review, dammit!)

Before I take off, I’d like to mention a few things. The comic has gotten some press again, this time in the form of the Anime Genesis Podcast, and Aarin’s Blog. Anime Gen declares me webcomic of the year, and Aarin gave me a fairly well thought out and honest review. Thanks to both of them.

That’s it for this week. I head back to school next week, but I’ll try to push out another comic before then. Later!

JAPAN. SKY GIRLS PORN. NOW.

I feel bad deleting episodes of Sky Girls after I watch them, as I find that I am truly liking the show enough to archive it for at least some time. All the elements just work so well for me. The character design, the voice acting, the animation, the setting, the premise, all of it. It just works damn well. Well, at least in the first four episodes. It has about 22 episodes left to go, and things can easily go sour. However, with JC Staff at the helm, I have confidence.

Honestly, I have no idea why I’m even thinking about this show after watching it. Generally with these types of shows I just watch them, have a good time, then move on to the next thing. Maybe it’s because my expectations were fairly low, and I was just so throughly surprised by the show’s quality. However, I don’t know why my expectations were low in the first place– I loved the OVA and thought “wow this should be a series.” I guess I just like to play it safe.

I guess the main things that really make it for me are the extremely sexy character design, the likable but somewhat familiar characters and awesome animation. The other stuff is good enough to make the show a bit more intelligible than Girls Bravo, but not truly remarkable as of yet. But hey, it’s pretty neat. I hope it develops into a very corny yet entertaining drama. I love those.

For some reason they thought they needed backstory, which was what episode one was. All set up to the crazy stuff we saw in the OVA released whenever ago. It’s not bad setup, but it’s also fairly generic setup. It’s probably needed though, to structure the series or something like that. It’s mostly LULS I WANNA FLY IN THE SKY and then the military comes along is like WELL NOW YOU CAN LULS. That’s basically it.

The animation is very well done, especially the combat scenes in the beginning. It seems JC Staff can do action right when they try! The character designs are very good, and to my liking. Not overly generic but not too different either. Strikes a good balance, I’d say. They all look very dainty and fuckable!

I don’t really have too much to say about this show at the moment. If the series develops to be as good as the oneshot OVA, I’ll be happy. I’m intrigued, and will stick around unless it really goes south.