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"?
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.
