Before I had a chance to start on the Spring Season of anime, the Summer season is nearing its end. So I did what any good fan would do, and wasted this weekend catching up on new episodes of anime I didn’t actually care to see.

Mawaru Penguindrum

I think this show is weird; but the girls are somewhat cute and the animation is good. I don’t quite get it, but the story’s got some pumped-up kicks to it and I’m high on caffeine, so I guess I’ll keep watching.

Mayo-Chiki

I don’t understand this anime. Subaru does not look nor act like a man. Why is everyone but the main character fooled? This harem series needs to figure itself out.

Blood-C

Whatever happened to the Chiropterans? Why is this new Saya fighting monsters that do not have anything in common with the enemies of previous renditions of this series save the consumption of humans? So many questions, and so few answers. I like Mizuki Nana and bloodletting, but those can only hold my interest for so long before I move onto bigger grander things.

Natsume Yuujinchou San

Ugh. If they’re not going to focus on the drama and beautiful backdrops that I’ve come to expect from Natsume Yuujinchou, then at the very least make Natsume Takashi less of a wimp. That kid is getting his ass kicked every episode for seemingly no reason. If he’s not conscious at the end of the episode to make some heartfelt statement about coexistence that makes everyone lost in thought, then what reason is there to have the show named after him? There’s only two course of action left for this show: a) Natsume needs to bang one of the females in the show, or b) Natsume needs to be banged by one of the males in the show. At this point, I’m ready to see just about anyone’s cherry popped.

Carnival Phantasm

The opening is more hilarious than the entirety of this anime.

Kamisama no Memochou

The fridge full of Dr.Pepper is very reminiscent of my personal reality. That may be the only reason this series caught my interest for more than one hour.

No.6

The homosexual undertone makes me second-guess myself every episode. I think I like this series more than I let on.

The iDOLM@STER

… It’s okay. But nothing amazing.

Sacred Seven

There’s only two reasons why I watch this: Sunrise and Girls. I think the script and directing could be better. Oh, and the main character’s costume leaves much to be desired.

Ro-Kyu-Bu

There’s a second season already green-lit for this anime. Why?

So there you have it. Disappointment after disappointment, and my patience is wearing thin. I will go back to reading manga.

Drawr.net is a Japanese artist community for creating and sharing illustrations and oekaki doodles. It sports a Flash web editor for making your own works on the site itself or to reply to images and people in image form. Each image has the process of the drawing saved where you can watch line by line of the image being created. The Pixiv owned site also has RSS feeds for all its members, new images, and the most recent popular. Unlike Pixiv you can browse the site freely without registration, but registration does mean having a Pixiv account. People and images can be bookmarked, as there isn’t a tagging or search system.

Genji
Works from Genji generally have a gang of these four or so characters and often times characters from GeGeGe no Kitaro and Akuma-kun. Works have a very rough appearance, layered hair, and well-chosen colors. Often times there will be subtle or not so subtle references to indie music or bands.
drawr | Pixiv | Tegaki | Site

t
Another artist with a flawless sense of style in character designs. Lots of abstract and fantasy imagery and the Vocaloid twins Rin and Len with consistent use of soft colors. Most works keep it simple and limit the number of different colors.
drawr | FC2 | Twitter | Pixiv

spring-buffalo
Akuma-kun and GeGeGe no Kitaro characters set in much darker, violent, or suggestive themes. Many of the drawr images are sets that can be viewed together when you try select one of the images and those sets can be often times very dramatic.
drawr | FC2 | Pixiv

On average, I spend anywhere between 2,000$USD and 4000$USD every year on manga. While I do occasionally purchase from domestic publishers such as Del Rey, Vertical, Yen Press, Tokyopop, Dark Horse and Viz; I primarily purchase a majority of my manga from online book retail shop bk1 or amazon. It’s not necessarily because the English line-up of manga is bland and lacks the presence of good titles. Actually, manga in America in current years has severely improved since the turn of the millenium. But I’m going off on another tangent… When you get down to it, I enjoy reading manga in my hand, and the monitor makes my eyes hurt.

I also hate piracy, but that would be rather hypocritical for me to claim.

My Japanese is far from proficient, but I can read most manga with no problem. And if I have no idea what the characters are saying, I just look at the pretty pictures and feel quite satisfied with myself. And yet, I still feel the need to download scanlation. I’m still working out the reasoning behind that. I own most manga I download the scanlations for, and in some cases I’m actually a bit ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the English-speaking world. Yet I still download scanlation.

So what exactly am I doing?

I guess I’m just not willing to give up on a major aspect of my adolescence. It’s also nice to read another translator’s take on a particular passage or exchange of dialogue. Sometimes I read scanlated works and think about how much of a better job I could have done on the translation, or sometimes I realize my interpretation of a particular scene was just plain wrong. It’s kind of refreshing to have scanlation, but I don’t condone it. I’m sort of a wishy-washy person. I don’t particularly find scanlation evil, but if someone boasts that he has read 90+ volumes of manga and hasn’t spent a single dollar on any one manga; then that just makes me really mad.

Occasionally, the way a translator presents a series can change my entire view on a series. Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, for example, did not seem like a series that I would be interested in. Then I went and read abcd’s translation and I could not stop laughing. It changed my whole perspective on the series. Perhaps scanlation is a necessary evil, not only for the Japanophiles who aren’t willing to sit down and learn the god-forsaken language, but also for veteran manga fanatics. After all, I probably wouldn’t have purchased most of my manga if not influenced by the scanlation on the Internet.

Or maybe I would’ve. Who knows?

So Yumekui Merry held my interest long enough to warrant that I watch the entire series. But that’s nothing new, since I watch anything that gets defecated from the cracks of J.C.Staff’s butt. And since I’m about three or four months late in watching this series, I will make full use of liberally revealing spoilers without using the black bar.

There are several merits (Or merryts, hah, I crack myself up.) going for this show. The ones I enjoyed particularly were as follows:

• Merry fights like a girl. No seriously. Imagine plucking an average school girl from the hustle and bustle of her average school life, and then augmenting her body with superhuman strength and enhanced reflexes. She still wins every battle purely by exploiting her speed and natural talents.
• It plays out like an indie flick. Everything including the music, the animated sequences to the voice acting had been finely polished to exfoliate an amateurish atmosphere normally only experienced in short independent films. I never expected this from J.C.Staff.
• The voice cast isn’t lined with big names. Nothing pisses me off more than hearing Rie Kugimiya in one of her tsundere routines, so a main cast stuffed with side character voices is definitely a relief on my ear drums.

Unfortunately, this show has more cons than I care to list. So I’ll highlight the main ones:

• Merry is retarded. Not only did she waste ten years of her life, lazing about and not doing a damn thing, but in all those years she never figured out an effective way to accomplish her primary mission: Finding Muma, or whatever they’re called.
• Merry is useless. She really needs to take advantage of Yumeji’s eye. Every other episode shows an innocent Muma essentially being slaughtered, while Merry is within shouting distance. Ignorance is bliss?
• Merry is wishy-washy. There aren’t many other shows that can shuffle its feet through this much detritus. Even at the end, the show does not make sense to me, or maybe it’s just too “artistic” to be understood. Either way, surrealism is just temporary putty for the cracks in concrete.
• Merry needs a waahmbulance. Every episode shows her crying, self-reflecting, or otherwise conflicted in some way. Just shut up already and die!
• Merry is useless. Merry has yet to save a single soul in thirteen episodes. I guess you could count the Club President, but everyone in this show is too stupid to realize that. If  Merry had a backbone she’d have beat all the bad guys by episode five and allowed me three hours of sleep, but she’s too busy dealing with inner conflict to resolve any actual conflicts. So what good is she? She can’t beat bad guys, she can’t save good guys, she can’t cook or clean, she can’t wait on tables, and hell, she can’t go four minutes without doing something stupid.

Oh speaking of boobs, I don’t see J.C.Staff’s signature breast jiggles… I wonder, whatever happened to those?

A typical episode goes like this:

Dororon Enma-kun Meramera is a new and improved version of some old classic kids’ show that nobody outside of Japan has ever heard of. The animation is handled by Brains Base, and looks superb. But the clincher for me was that the character designs are by none other than Kimura Takahiro. The genius behind the cute and sexy or hot and voluptuous females of such series as: GaoGaiGar, Goddannar, Usagi-chan de Cue, Gun x Sword and Code Geass.

Like all Go Nagai productions, this show has subliminal perversion scattered throughout… Waitaminute! It’s not subliminal at all! It’s pretty hilarious. At this early point, it’s difficult for me to figure out the world views of these characters. Does Yukikohime get annoyed by Enma’s advances? Or does she enjoy it? So far she hasn’t really filled in either the sweet or the sour portion of the character mold, and I’m getting confused by her lack of substance. I mean, if she doesn’t like people looking at her snatch, then why doesn’t she wear panties? Why is her skirt so short? Why is she always getting captured and stripped naked? What a slut, she’s totally asking for it. And yet, as soon as someone whips out his dick, she has to do a 360, and goes, “Kyaah, pervert!” and freezes them. It’s a bit disappointing since she’s supposed to be the heroine of the show. Harumi, someone I don’t believe was in the original, is filling in the role of the protagonist. Enma is sort of just there… to burn shit.

So, maybe you don’t like little girls, you don’t like gag comedies, and you don’t like Takahiro Kimura. Well, that’s more than enough reason to not like this show, and I give you props for sticking to your guns. I personally think shows like these are just acquired tastes, like death metal or cow urine. So I’ll understand if I’m the only one watching this show right now.

I’m about three months late in writing a post about Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I was looking forward to this show since its announcement, mostly because I’m a huge magical girl nerd; and partly because it’s from SHAFT. The first episode did not seem special, if you would allow me the shame of admitting. Even though the music was great, and Yuki Kajiura alone used to be enough incentive for me to stick with crappy shows for entire seasons– Let’s face it, I have a job and a real life. What saved the show from a quick termination on my hard drive was thanks to one thing and one thing only: the flintlock muzzle loaders.

Having stuck with this show for ten episodes, I did something I haven’t done in nearly a year now: I went back and started watching from episode one. This show has great rewatchability. All that I have learned from the episodes to come highlight details that went unnoticed during my first watch through. Now that everything makes sense, it allowed me time for deeper analysis. Before long, I was taking down notes for a future thesis I will never get around to write. This show is a step-up from the other crap I’ve been wasting my time with as of late.

Caution: Puella Magi Madoka Magica is depressing and Cubey is a dick.

So far there are no blatant plot holes I can’t explain away with magic. Take it how you will, but I’m real enough to think that means this show is gold. Time to buy the Blu-Ray.