The recent airing of the second series of Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls poses the question of why the stylish but lacklustre first season was deemed worthy of a sequel, but also conjures up the spirit of genre stalwarts such as the long running Sekirei and Ikkitousen franchises - each series with a more ridiculous alliterative subtitle than the last - as well as one-offs such as Tenjho Tenge. The specific taxonomy of these series is usually spread between "fantasy", "martial arts" and the all-encompassing "fan service" categories, but works equally well as just "fighting fanservice" (FF).
smutty, double-X chromosome fighting still sells
With a few exceptions, the entire point of these series is to group voluptuous girls together so they can beat seven shades of tar out of one another, usually with disastrous consequences for their clothing and decency. Twice tickling the lizard brain for those who are titillated by such things then: violence and sex. Tweak the variables from breasts to blood though and you have horror (see Blood-C, Elfen Lied, Ga-Rei Zero etc.). Catering to base desires though doesn't leave a lot of room for story or character development with many of the plot lines and episodic stories simplistic even if they were in a children's Saturday morning cartoon and utterly worthless for anything other than hurtling the cast from one arena to the next.
I'm on a quest to understand exactly why I like the anime that I do. It's relatively easy to enumerate which ones I like more than others, MyAnimeList exists more-or-less exactly for this purpose, but that doesn't really explore what makes a show excellent beyond an attempt to pattern-match (studio, release year etc.) or to compare with others to find compatibility and recommendations.
...finding interest in the mundane or levity in the absurd.
Teasing an answer more meaningful than "I just do" means examining constituents, and for varying reasons - my continual battle to write creative fiction one - characters, specifically protagonists, stand more prominently than others. To enumerate all the different archetypes would be folly and missing the point: great protagonists - great characters - transcend the clichés imposed upon them by genre or circumstance. All too often though anime lets the archetypes rule - why else would there be the existence of shortcut words like "tsundere"?
Eleven days, almost twelve and a half thousand words, nineteen videos, one hundred screenshots and ten anime later, the summation of a decade of anime is complete.
Claymore's hook is the presence of blonde, nubile young ladies with the titular, impossibly large swords set in a fantastical, medieval world. Being able to move past this premise is the first of many things that this series manages to do well, unfortunately it is marred by a plethora of other niggling problems which turn what could have been a great series into one that, overall, is lamentably mediocre.
Putting more than twenty slim, blonde females into a dark and snowy mountain town probably sounded a lot better on paper
Claymore goes wrong by being indecisive as to what it is trying to be and what it is trying to convey. The lithe girls with swords bait is more or less ignored from the outset with a surprising lack of fan-service and obvious lesbian undertones; this creates a problem with what is essentially a shounen series. The "monster of the week" cliché is dispatched with swiftly and a story unravels which thrusts the protagonist, Clare, from one hopeless battle to the next. Neither the story nor the characters are enough to carry this off, its one saving grace is the speed at which the story moves. Not so much adapted, but lifted straight from the manga, the series works on a "one episode, one chapter" progression which means otherwise tedious story elements and swiftly dealt with and otherwise enjoyable combat set-pieces drag on far too long.
