The "dream railway paradise entertainment" story is set in a parallel world where Japan did not privatize its national railways.
I’ll admit I only got through the first sentence of Rail Wars!description before passing judgement on it. I decided to watch it primarily on the strength of illustrator Vania 600’s character designs but without knowing much else. The alternate reality and mention of privatisation of the railways evoked images of different government departments duking it out on trains - it had “wars” in the title after all. As is my brain is wont to do, it pattern-matched this idea to what I’d heard about Toshokan Sensou (Library War) which had a similarly ridiculous sounding premise of library backed paramilitary groups battling with government censorship groups.
he is now part of the thrilling and sexy world of trains
Having not previously seen Toshokan Sensou, I decided to watch the two series in parallel, fully expecting to be equal parts amused and baffled by the surreal alternate histories but otherwise underwhelmed. What I didn’t expect was for Toshokan Sensou to be so serious, and for Rail Wars! to be quite so pants-on-head dumb.
It’s right there in the first few lines of the opening: “Kiss kiss kiss, I can’t take my eyes off you”. That’s the entirety of Sakura Trick, the length and breadth of its offering. The initial gambit is much bolder: a fluffy but uninhibited romance between two young women; the reality though lacks a lot of what could have made that worthwhile. Wait, rewind. Sakura Trick isn’t for me. As a modern, self-effacing male, it’s probably prudent to start with that. It’s also not as though I have a whole lot of context for what the twelve episode series brings to the shoujo ai genre (although Wikipedia insists it’s targeted at young adult males). Certainly I have touchstone shows to fall back on like Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena as well as the briefest of exposures to Maria-sama ga Miteru and Strawberry Panic but in terms of it embodying or enhancing its genre? Very little.
wreathed in pastel shades and inundated with an endless source of cherry blossom
It’s refreshing at first to see an intimate relationship between two characters in an anime that doesn’t cleave closely to the harem or chase-the-girl setups. The series is bookended by what feels like a natural progression for the two protagonists: starting with them advancing to more than just friends and finishing with them questioning what love is. The naturalness presents the initial allure because it normalises a same-sex relationship that is elsewhere presented as coy and unspoken with series like My-HiME or even Stellvia of the Universe. It becomes a given that Haruka and Yuu are together and that either their friends are oblivious to it or blithely accept it.
Amagami SS parades hollow, vacuous simpletons around in a grotesque approximation of a romance plot; cretins drawn with all the grace of a gorilla with a crayon shoved up its nose, splattered wholesale into a story that is as if the plot of a romance novel were faxed to the writers but was horribly smeared and distorted in the process, leaving just a grim and disfigured estimate as to what was intended. These are not even characters but amalgamations of the most tired, staid and all-round tedious aspects of archetypes that have mutated into a hideous, cringeworthy diorama of what sociopaths believe realistic or dramatically engaging human interaction is. There is no merciful release from these mannequins pretending to be people, only the grim realisation that there are twenty four episodes of uninspired, stupidity inducing drivel to come.
delights in emasculating her sycophantic barely-male toy that one day latched onto her like an unwelcome parasite
The plot as it stands concerns Junichi who after being slighted by an as yet nameless girl doesn't take the honourable and budget saving route of giving himself over to a psychiatric ward and instead constructs a pithy home made planetarium in his cupboard out of marker pen and tears of rejection. Through the abject failure of natural selection, the doddering halfwits he associates himself with haven't murdered him out of boredom or compassion and continue to potter about their own superficial lives. His hormones eventually determine he should pursue a girl one year his senior but whose mind is the colour of bitumen and has all the personality of a long deceased lemming. While he kowtows to her every whimsical desire, humiliating himself in front of his sole male acquaintance in the process, she remains fickle and obtuse and, with any luck, is plotting a gory end to his pathetic existence.
Another series another lascivious story seed, this time with the formation of a high school underwear club by a girl smitten with all things underwear. Rolling one's eyes and ploughing into the first three episodes of Chu-Bra!! it becomes increasingly apparent that this isn't the naughty teenage giggle parade that is expected from such a premise. Instead it is a charmingly sexless celebration of a girl whose passion is looked upon with disdain by the prudish or antagonistic students of a school that is all but aligned against her, a situation easy to relate to in principle if not in implementation.
Hiroki, who suffers from a rare form of underwear paralysis
At the entrance ceremony of middle school, Nayu embarrasses herself by tripping up when called to give the opening speech; this also inadvertently exposes her adult underwear to an unsuspecting student body who begin to circulate rumours about her partaking of compensated dating and other less wholesome activities. In reality however Nayu simply loves underwear, despite her adoration resulting in her being a pariah since junior school, it takes some investigation but two classmates, Yako and Haruka, discover the truth behind Nayu and become fast friends with her. As Nayu's confidence grows she suggests the formation of an underwear club, however this is met with resistance from the uptight head of the more generic handicrafts club and finding members proves an uphill struggle, even if she is wearing the brassier and panties her grandmother gifted her.
Looking over the list of anime Sunrise have produced, it's clear that sequels and continuations are their bread and butter. Before them however there must be a seed, a rare series that sparked the continuations and alternate universes and other tortured ways of wringing all possible money from an idea. My-HiME is one of those sparks, a precious mixture of innovative ideas and superlative execution that, as is so often the case, much better than the follow ups and subsequent adaptations.
one of the most gloriously over-the-top underwear focused episodes ever conceived
Mai and her brother recently obtained scholarships to the prestigious Fuka academy but while travelling to the school, their boat is attacked and eventually scuttled. It transpires that Mai is a HiME - an obtuse acronym for Highly-advanced Materialising Equipment - a valkyrie able to summon a beast forged more of metal than flesh, a Child, and tasked with fighting wayward monsters known as Orphans. All is not as it seems though when the source of the Orphans is defeated: prior alliances begin to crumble and the school becomes a battleground. As the fighting intensifies, a distant star draws closer and threatens to bring a cataclysm to Earth.
