The formula is all too familar: alien lands on earth, befriends local youth and romantic hijinks ensue. The opening episodes of Asobi ni iku yo! do nothing to tweak this formula beyond adding cat-ears and a tail to the buxom interplanetary interloper. The recent Ano Natsu de Materu at least kept things clean, here the feline Eris is disrobed and in the protagonist's bed within minutes. Seconds later and the domineering childhood friend arrives (how inconvenient!) and the quiet and traditional Japanese beauty follows shortly afterwards.
Those who, somewhat rightly, switch off after those episodes though would be missing what turns out to be a surprisingly entertaining romp through science fiction of old and a locale less travelled: Okinawa.
I should know better really, I do it every year. The summer or autumn anime season rolls around and my interest in keeping up week-on-week ebbs as quickly as the long nights. It doesn't so much break a habit as press pause on a lifestyle, leaving other hobbies and interests fill the vacuum.
I would rather read a book about hikkikomori syndrome than I would about media theory and Nausicaa
As the source dries up, content for this blog follows suit like an abandoned tributary. As with anything you do for sixteen years, I never wholly stop. I follow hang-overs from the previous season (Accel World, Eureka Seven AO and Hyouka in this instance) in spurts and sprints but the impetus to write anything about them is vanishingly small. Though not for lack of trying. I've tried to elucidate my qualms with Hyouka no less than three times only to end with the digital equivalent of crumpling up a sheet of paper and hurling it towards the bin (pressing delete on a Wordpress draft).
So I made a quiz from the episodes I've seen. Despite not having seen it, there is a Who is Imouto (Kono Naka ni Hitori Imouto ga Iru) question in there but that one pretty much wrote itself.
It's probable that Bodacious Space Pirates isn't what you expect. Based off the imaginatively titled Miniskirt Space Pirates light novel, this is not cute girls drinking tea in space. Well, not all of the time.
The series starts divisively enough by explaining the finer points of course plotting and the minutiae of electronic warfare between space vessels, hammering home the point with an encounter concluded through abstract blobs moving about on a computer screen and the futuristic equivalent of touch typing. It's an approach that nestles between the hard science-fiction of Sekai no Senki and the bombast of Nadesico.
Common stories are when one plus one is two, a great story (as Ken Burns puts it) is when one plus one equals three. At its heart the quote implies that it's the absurd and the implausible that can change a decent story into a brilliant one. So too is it with Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (Dusk Maiden of Amnesia) which, on paper, could have easily ended up as "My Girlfriend is a Ghost". Instead it's an impassioned love story between a dorky teenager and a ghost over half a century old.
a roller coaster of teen angst and emotions - deftly dealing with love, death and jealously
The series starts oddly enough by bifurcating the first episode: the same events but with a crucial shift in viewpoint between each telling. This is just the first in what becomes a host of extraordinarily brave moves in direction by Oonuma that temper his artisan abstractions of ef - a tale of memories, keeping the series visually arresting but less navel gazing.
