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Posts tagged “dere-dere”
Several girls galore (the alluring aroma of Perfume)
The PC’s on the blink again. It’ll be over a week before I can put right whatever’s wrong so in the meantime I’m working on the backup machine, my trusty four-year-old low-spec laptop. So here I am, running in the Aniblog Tourney with little to write about because I can’t watch much; I feel like I have an important call to make when my mobile phone’s in the pocket of My Other Jacket.
So I thought I might as well write about Perfume. Music dominates a lot of my spare time: I immerse myself in as much as possible, ignoring the usual boundaries of time, trends and genre in favour of my own so sometimes my tastes are a bit unpredictable. My fascination with Perfume is a guilty-pleasure kind of thing, but not completely so.
A feelgood after-life and meaningful ecchi in My Lovely Ghost Kana
Sometimes it’s rewarding to take a complete stab in the dark and pick up something different from what you normally read. I’m unfamiliar with Yutaka Tanaka for instance, which isn’t surprising since his CV largely consists of ero stuff and a few bit parts in animation on the side. I had second thoughts about reading and blogging about My Lovely Ghost Kana since it is, in parts at least, an ero title.
The legal alcohol drinking age in Japan is 20, so yeah. No thought-crimes committed on my part
There is indeed a lot of sauce in this, to the point at which the opening chapters give a false impression of where the story eventually chooses to go. The infamous ‘deceptive-ness of the first impression’ isn’t on the scale of Onani Master Kurosawa, but the effect it had on me was similar. It even manages to go some way towards justifying the sexual content, which is an achievement in itself; the clincher is that it pays attention to the characterisation and even makes a worthwhile attempt at a storyline. Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised.
Careful with that axe, Yui
As difficult as it is, I have to admit that I’m enjoying K-On. Not because it’s intelligent, thought-provoking, original or a work of art. I’m enjoying it despite it not really being any of these things, mainly because something that’s so intentionally dumb is undemanding and therefore the perfect thing for unwinding with at the end of a long day.
Yes, it’s shallow, commercialised and derivative but truthfully as long as it makes you smile, who the heck cares? I’ve done at least three drafts of this post before wiping the whole lot off the screen and starting over; this is by its very nature a show that’s difficult to write about because there’s not much to it beyond the obvious observation that it’s cute, undemanding fun. That was before my word count began to mushroom…
Haruhi Suzumiya light novel #1: where Kyon fears to tread
There’s still a lot to be said for the good old-fashioned medium of words stamped onto slices of dead trees. I honestly believe certain stories work better in one medium than another; Haruhi Suzumiya is I think a case in point. The TV show’s shuffled broadcast order never significantly improved the experience because I’ve yet to hear a convincing explanation for it. The translation of the light novel on the other hand seems to keep an ordered chronology as nature, and Nagaru Tanigawa, intended and is more satisfying for that.
The prose reads smoothly and I’m pretty impressed with the presentation too (my only regret is not getting the hardback version. I’m anal about such things). What makes an even bigger difference than its adherence to the timeline, or the fact that it retains Noizi Ito’s original illustrations, is the first-person narrative approach that the novel takes. Unlike the TV broadcast order, which came across as little more than a cool gimmick, this detail makes the world of difference.
Onani Master Kurosawa: Redemption is in your own hands
A long time ago I saw a single-page scan of what looked like a one-off doujin Death Note parody where a kid made it his mission to masturbate daily in a girls’ toilet at school. His triumphant “Just as planned!” was amusing enough but I assumed it was a throwaway piece of toilet humour so after forgetting what blog I saw the pic on I thought nothing more of it. That was until the community word-of-mouth thing featuring Ghostlightning, David and Samshiel among others jogged my memory. The doujin in question was Onani Master Kurosawa and it proved to be more than just dirty jokes and a parody or two. A hell of a lot more.
Click for the full size version
Make no mistake: this is a story with strong language and shows events and behaviour that are liable to offend some. It has some wonderful bits of humour though, including neat jabs at not only Death Note but Haruhi Suzumiya and Code Geass, but what makes this something I’d recommend so strongly is the fact that the superficial lulz accompany something more memorable and moving. If you excuse the pun, I never saw it coming.
Miyazaki’s Laputa (from the POV of my younger self)
I always find the “How did you get into anime?” discussions fascinating. Way before my first proper anime experience I watched an obscure animated feature film that gave me great memories. I mentally filed it under Something I’ll Never See Again and almost fooled myself into thinking I’d forgotten about it, so it was quite something when I spotted a familiar-looking image on the front of a DVD case over a decade later and bought the thing on the spot. The DVD in question was Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which I later bought again on Japanese import because that was the edition that contained the older English language dub I remembered so held the real nostalgia value.
I wonder if the quoted value of 5cm per second for sakura petals is altitude-dependent
While I normally blog from the point of view of the cynical 27-year-old I am today the reason why my opinion of it is the way it is stems from experiencing it through a child’s eyes; it is after all a kids’ adventure story so that tack makes more sense to me. I’ve done a very simplified run-down of my favourite bits from my original viewing, with numbered annotations to include the benefits of hindsight. It’s an unusual approach for me, so I hope it works here.
It would appear I’m also tsundere for Haruhi Suzumiya-chan
It’s funny watching the “Where’s my Haruhi sequel?!” dorama unfold from a distance and not really being fussed one way or the other. If my finances were a little healthier I’d have bought the DVDs of the first season already but since 1. I still think Mushishi is more awesome* and 2. my Tokyo trip is my priority at the moment they’ll have to wait. While I’m not as affected by the absence of Haruhi’s second appearance as most people I did begin to take a passing interest in the chibi-fied, ONA incarnation, Suzumiya-chan Haruhi no Yuutsu. Eventually.
I honestly believe there’s a lot of potential in ONAs: not just the fifteen minute slabs of win that make up Eve no Jikan and the idea of Crunchyroll ‘going straight’ but the general freedom of expression and distribution that the format offers. I can’t comment on CR’s integrity in the past, though, and truthfully the ONA issue would warrant a post of its own. In any case the launch of the Haruhi spin-off that I’m guessing is supposed to stop the fans lynching the studio staff fill the gap before the second season bypassed all that and went straight to Youtube; even in the current climate I was pleasantly surprised at that.
I guess it’s time I defended the Clannad After-Story
Sorry, no V-day post for you. The timestamp is purely coincidental; I just got caught in Draft Rewrite Hell yesterday. But this is a pretty romantic show though, right?
You may remember that I have a turbulent relationship with Clannad. I was frustrated by its tendency to drift into overt sentimentality and sit uncomfortably between fantasy and reality; it offered a principle story thread to follow, only to divert its attention to side-stories; then the said side-stories proved to be sometimes more enjoyable than the main plot thread. It’s a strange feeling when an alternate-universe retelling, reduced to one episode tagged on the end, was my favourite moment of them all and proved to be almost as memorable as the rest of the first season combined.
I guess it’s unfair to criticise it for the fact that it’s a product of a lucrative franchise produced by a commercially successful studio and is adapted from a visual novel since, well, I can hardly criticise the VN medium at all now, can I? Similarly the most superficial aspect of all, the cutesy moe-fied aesthetic, shouldn’t be an issue but let’s face it, often it is. Ultimately though Clannad frustrates me because one moment it’s ‘just another fan-aware high school romance show’ with all the plot devices and tropes that go along with it, and the next it’s flooring me with heartfelt emotion and genuinely well-executed storytelling.