Icky Anime!

[elfs]

This week heralded the new anime season in Japan, and like the fiend I am I put my podcaster to "Get me everything with '01' in the title this week." I have no idea what I'm getting; I'm just sucking down every first episode of the new season. So I've been exposed to Sousei no Aquarion (giant-robots-piloted-by-arrogant-preppies), Law of Ueki (Naruto, representing the Green party), Futakoi Alternative (a harem series, some liked it, I thought it was dull and derivative), Sunset All Around, which is very derivative boy-meets-girl, and Speed Grapher which is just pointless sex and violence.

If this is anything to go on, it looks like it's a terrible season. This week's offerings have been clones of things that have gone before, without any innovation to speak of.

And then, Tuesday night my podcaster brought me Loveless.

Loveless can best be described is "What if a gay furry pederast was given the permission and budget to re-write the Highlander TV series?" In this series, everyone has ears and a tail, making the story full of cute catboys and catgirls. They lose their furry traits when they lose their virginity. So most adults look like mere humans. The hero of the series is Ritsuko, a 12-year-old boy, who is depressed and lonely since his 16-year-old brother died.

Into this comes Suibo, age 20, who tells Ritsuko that there is a battle on for control of the magic in the world. Magic comes from mages in pairs, the Warrior and the Sacrifice. The warrior can cast spells and the sacrifice absorbs defensive damage. The battle is on for supremacy. Suibo tells Ritsuko that he is neither good nor evil, he is just trying to survive. And then Suibo starts coming on to Ritsuko, even forcing a kiss on him. The episode ends with Suibo easily dispatching another team while he holds Ritsuko, who then asks to be put down. "Let me hold you just a little bit longer, Ritsuko." The credits roll.

Ugh. All I can say is, "If that's innovation, give me the clones." I will not be watching any more of that! I think what creeps me out most is that this show is insanely popular in Japan with girls.

Comments

[dapepster.livejournal.com]

Wow... doesn't sound like much new anime that is any good. [i]Initial D[/i] is excellent, but to DL all that would take quite a while. :)

Podcasting

[walkingbear.livejournal.com]

Thanks for a great writeup. At least I know what shows *not* to go for this season. Though the Naruto derivative might be interesting, simply as a comparison to Naruto proper.

I have a question about podcasting. Where can I get more info on setting it up to grab the episodes in a specific search pattern? It's a bit tedious to flag and download singletons all the time.

Thanks.

Re: Podcasting

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I cheat!

I use Liferea as my RSS aggegrator. I have a cron job that looks through the Liferea cache every hour or so and looks for new torrents on Baka-Updates, TokyoToshan, and DownloadAnime, and then compares them to a list of regular expressions. It runs 'wget' to grab the torrent and drops it into my active download directory. Bittorrent picks them up automatically.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The Naruto comment was a bit snarky. Ueto looks like your fundamental one-on-one fighting anime, except the hero has a weird superpower: he can turn garbage into greenery. "Politically correct heroism" is one of the other weird phrases I've seen on Ueto's home page.

[moofinator.livejournal.com]

The Warrior and the Sacrifice? Sounds like a seme/uke pair to me, which would explain why japanese girls go nuts over it.

Japanese women like watching guys make out as much as American men like watching girls make out. But the 12-20 thing, that's odd. Are these shows actually on 'cable' television or on the Cinemax of Japanese TV?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It's being carried by TV Asahi, which is one of the major broadcasters in Japan. According to their website, they have 23 regional broadcast stations throughout the island, so I'm assuming this is available via the airwaves.