I felt like a monster after the final episode of Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (Your Lie in April). The ending was always going to go one of two ways and I was braced for either one: agonising tears or delirious happiness. I certainly didn’t expect to feel nothing. All these other people gushing tears, drowning in hyperbole, and there I was, indifferent. I had cheered Kousei Arima on through the bright lights of stage performances and honey-lit afternoon walks home but in the denouement I realised that all the individual things that irked me about the series had gathered like so much detritus on a beach and was now spoiled.

I knew what I was getting in to of course. Awash with pastel shades and misty eyed teenagers this was a romance series first and foremost with the “musician’s heart” narrative the tempo to the love story melody. Kousei starts out unable to play the piano, supposedly a prodigy from a young age, he is invited on a date by his best friend and serial flirt Ryouta where he meets the series’ poster child, Kaori Miyazono.

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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.

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Sometimes blog posts just don't turn out the way you want them to. Whether due to the content or the implementation, they'll often end up smashing through the central reservation of the Good Intention motorway, hurtle down the Mediocrity slipway and end up in Dumb Idea ditch, back wheels still spinning.

My drafts folder is littered with these. Some are just a single word, like the opening to my Final Fantasy XIII review which was simply "bleh"; or they're almost complete and all that prevented pressing the enticing curves of the publish button was a lack of faith.

This is what happened with the firebrand titled "Does modern anime suck?", a post from one year prior which attempted to use Science™ to prove that modern anime doesn't suck and the familiar cries that echo every quarter of a year claiming as such were flat wrong.

That was the theory, the practise turned out to be less than convincing.

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