Elf Sternberg

I just read Girl's Ride, Chapter 5. It's lovely but... that's it? That's all we're getting? Five chapters of unresolved sexual tension, and all we get is an outdoor shot of the isolated shrine and a little “はい?”

Oh come on, that scene in Chapter 2 totally promised more than this. I'm so disappointed.

KickInTheHead mashed up the video for over 90 anime opening sequences, showing how the same motifs occur again and again:

So, I just watched episode one To Aru Kagaku no Railgun (eng: A Certain Scientific Railgun), which has to be just about the stupidest super-powered girl, yuri-on-the-hoof anime series yet. The setting is basically an entire city turned over to the study of Marvel-style psionics: telepaths, telekinets, etc. etc.

The heroine, Mikoto Misaka, is the most ass-kicking telekinetic the city has ever seen. Her power manifests as electrical charges, so she has the nickname "The Railgun," and with a handful of coins she can destroy whole armies. She's introduced during testing; while her roommate and the sterotypical stuck-up rich older girl trade barbs, they're suddenly flung on their asses by a shockwave from the school pool. The roommate preens about how powerful this new girl is, they need to use the entire olympic swimming pool just to slow down the quarters she tosses. At the end of the epsisode, Mikoto, her friend Kuroko, and two other characters are introduced, and Mikoto becomes friends with an innocent and un-superpowered girl. They interrupt a robbery, and when one of the villains kick said girl in the face and then tries to escape in a high-speed car, Mikoto flips a coin in the air, and when it falls in front of her she destroys the car with it. All what you'd expect from an Episode 1. "Hi, here's our main cast, we're all magical girls, and here's what the heroine is capable of doing."

The art's quite good, although it devolves way too often when the plot get silly.

What is really sad about the series is the way it's already basically yuri hentai: Kuroko conspires constantly on how to convince Mikoto that they should both go to a love hotel, and in one scene even manages to get her hands under Mikoto's shirt and feel her up. Men show up in this episode only when being arrested.

I kinda want to watch this series, because I kinda like Mikoto: she's got a mix of personas all battling for identity: super-powered heroine besieged by fans, insecure girl unsure of her powers, stuck-up idol, stage-frightened but capable of powering through. But the extremely poorly-handled lesbian crush annoys the Hell out of me (shocking, isn't it?). Kuroko's crush on Mikoto isn't sexual, or romantic, or fannish, or... or anything. It exists because the writers want it to exist, and not because either character would otherwise really want it.

Okay, okay. Here's the manga I squeed about this morning, in a publicly-accessible scanlation: Morinaga Milk's Girlfriends, chapter 13.

My last two laptops have all been named for some dangerous feminine AI from anime (for very flexible definitions thereof): Ai, Lain, and Kusanagi. Now I'm looking for one for my new machine, and I'm leaning toward Kurumi, but there are other possibilities:

• Miyu, from Mai-HiME
• Chi, from Chobits
• Maico, from Anna Maico
• Mahoro, from Mahoromatic
• Jenny, from My Life as a Teenage Robot
• Kosmos, from Xenosaga
• Anevka, from Girl Genius
• Ping, from Megatokyo

So many possibilities! Anyone got a favorite or a counter-suggestion?

Someone recommended Shining Tears X Wind to me on the grounds that it would be perfect for me: "Bishii, Babes, and Furries." And sure enough, it's got all of the above: two cute guys who aren't aware they should be off somewhere else making out, two hot and busty high school senior chixxors who exist only to be demure damsels in distress, and so far at least one hyperactive catgirl.

It's too bad the best adjective I can come up with for this show is dorky. Because that's what it is. Disjunct, pointless writing, horrible art (the frame rate during the fight scenes is so bad it reminded me of 1980s American cartoons like Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors), characters that manifest new talents and bizarre behaviors totally out of character at the silliest moments, and poorly integrated and inappropriate CGI.

This show has a completely lack of respect for its audience: it's too mature for kids, and too stupid for adults.

So, I just mainlined the entire Evangelion original broadcast, all 26 episodes, no director's cut, no movies, in about eight solid hours. Up until about Episode 22 it was doing okay, and then it all fell apart. The end is a complete mess, the entire point of the show gets lost.

I even recognized the problem. The writer/producer/director thought he had something and then he woke up one morning, looked at his script, and said to himself, "I got nothin'." He flailed around for a week and then said, "I know, I'll tell everyone it's a deep mediation on the fact that I went through a really shitty depression phase in my mid-20s, throw out the story, and just mess with people's heads anyway." Who knows? Maybe Anno-san really did have something when he started and just ran out of steam. It was a beautiful, brilliant piece, it seemed to be going somewhere, and then... blah.

I also don't get why Ayanami Rei is such a popular character. She's a blank, a cipher, more annoying than Asuka ever could be. Part of the reason is that her relationship with Gendo is never clarified: why is she so damn perky in that one scene and then a complete waste the rest of the series?

And yet, I so wanted there to be more to this series. I'm so disappointed in it: I wanted Shinji to be more than a mouthpiece for Anno's fucking "I'm okay, you're okay" bullshit. I wanted Asuka to recover, and Rei to find herself, and all the other things that the characters deserved and didn't get.

I wanted to laugh, or cry, or have some reaction, however tritely elicited. Neon Genesis Evangelion failed, leaving me only annoyed and let down.

Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb and maybe piss someone off: Sousei No Aquarion is a better giant robot series than Neon Genesis Evangelion. The characters in Aquarion aren't as deeply wounded, and maybe that's to its detriment, but on the whole it's a better-made series. It has an arc, intent, and a proper ending, and, y'know, it's really made with as much courage, often for hilarity's sake as much as the dramatic ending, as Evangelion.

Giving away even what about I'm about to give away amounts to a spoiler for the first episode, but I'm gonna do it anyway. The anime series Asatte no Houkou (link goes to a search for the series on my favorite anime site) is the sweetest, loveliest bit of anime to come by since Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (aka Someday's Dreamers). And the English title's mangling is just as bad: The literal translation of Someday's Dreamers' native title was "Things Important to a Mage." The literal translation of Our Summer Story's native title is "The Direction Taken the Day After Tomorrow."

Karada is a young girl of 11 who lives with her brother Hiro, who's 19. She hates being treated like a child, and she agonizes that her brother has sacrificed so much to care for her since their parents died three years ago in an accident. Shouko is an unhappy woman of 19 who comes to the small town where Karada and Hiro live, and she tells Karada she came to this out-of-the-way place to start her life over. In the first episode we learn that Shouko and Hiro had some kind of relationship before he disappeared from her life-- and now she learns that he abandoned her to do the right thing and care for his sister.

After an evening of confrontation and argument, Karada and Shouko both end up in front of a Shinto shrine where they both issue secret prayers simultaneously. As the moon breaks over the shrine, they turn to one another-- and Karada has gotten her wish. She's suddenly aged eight years; she has her wish, people will treat her like an adult. Shouko, in turn, gets her wish as well: she's lost eight years. She has her chance to start her life over.

You'd think that this could be played up for ecchi fare with questionable loli content, but the writers clearly aren't going for that. If Someday's Dreamers made you feel all mushy and happy inside, Our Summer Story will make you want to tear up and cry at the end of each episode, but for a different reason, and not always because you feel sad. Both Karada and Shouko are freaking out learning to live with their new selves (the scene where Shouko realizes that, at 11, nobody will buy her cigarettes is quite nicely done), and Hiro is also freaking out because the little sister he's tried so hard to take care of has suddenly vanished.

Supporting these three are the sister & brother team Touko and Tetsumasa, both of whom are apparently close to the ages of Hiro and Karada (the sister is a year younger than Hiro, and the brother a year and a half older than Karada), and have been their moral (and sometimes physical) support for the past three years. They provide all sorts of useful roles: a contrasting "couple", greek chorus, comic relief, and subtle emotional tension.

Anime has gotten a bad rap recently. The last three seasons have been remarkably without the kind of lovely, emotional tones set by Someday's Dreamers, and while experiments like Simoun tried while tottering on the brink of absurdity, the current spate of violent, bloody, vampire and monster-laden flicks desperately needed something as sweet as Our Summer Story for balance. (Aria came close two seasons ago, but it was more a series of lovely vignettes with no real character conflict, no real emotional impact.)

Our Summer Story is also done well. The art is beautiful, with watercolor backgrounds and clean, well-drawn characters in an established, traditional style that goes well with the series. The music is beautiful, small-band piano style that never intrudes but always fits well.

Definitely worth a watch.

I decided to watch Simoun raw. So the first thing I did was try and translate the kanji during the opening scene. I struggled for twenty minutes to find the first two kanji in the sentence in my SKIP dictionary before I figured out that it read "While watching Simoun..." and didn't need to translate the rest.

(For those of you unfamiliar with anime, ( Why... )

So, I'm finally getting caught up on my anime and watching Kashimashi, also known as Girl Meets Girl (just so you know where I'm coming from). The premise is silly: Hazumu, a rather sweet an sensitive boy of approximately 14 years of age is accidentally struck by a falling UFO, the occupants of which, in the process of putting him back together figure that the Y chromosome is just a variant of the X and "fix" it: Hazumu is returned to his life now as a girl.

As it turns out, there were two girls who had a crush on Hazumu: the tomboyish Tomari, and the reserved, shy, sweet, already-knows-she's-yuri Yasuna. Tomari would much rather have Hazumu back as a boy, but Hazumu had his heart set on Yasuna, and now that Hazumu is a girl Yasuna is intent on making it so, and Tomari is willing to overcome her heterosexuality if she can have Hazumu.

It's all very cute, with Yasuna almost getting to a kiss with Hazumu before Tomari interrupts them. However, the show has developed an angle I don't find comforting: Yasuna is the way she is because she can't really even see boys. They're just a blur to her. It's not that she doesn't like boys, it's just that girls are so much sharper in focus to her senses that boys are sorta "faded out" of her world.

I hope the writers don't do anything really cheesy and basically have the aliens deus ex machina up two Hazumus, one male and one female, and "make everything allright" and, oh, by the way, Yasuna does learn to see and hear and actually communicate with boys. That would be too easy.