So a bunch of anime I was watching finished their run.

Darker than BLACK: Gemini of the Meteor

The problem with DtB was that it ended with a bunch of questions and answering very few of them. The problem with DtB2 is that it didn’t answer any of the questions from the last season and added new ones and didn’t answer those either. It also removed most of the likeable characters or the parts of characters that were likeable. So yeah, the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t need a sidestory OVA to explain things that we were waiting for you to explain.

So Ra No Wo To

A.K.A. that show that looked like K-ON! but was superficially similar. At worst, it was some slice of life in a small European town. It had quite a few moments though, from moonshining to PTSD to the revelation of a post-apocalyptic wasteland right outside the borders. Not spectacular, but definitely not bad.

Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆

More Hidamari, more awesome. I was dreading what might happen if we threw in two more characters, but Nazuna and Nori filled out the cast pretty well. They weren’t exactly the Yuno and Miya clones I was expecting them to be. We’ve also got new relationship dynamics now that we have all the years filled out. Another highly enjoyable wideface season.

Kobato.

Not my kind of show, but I still watched it. It was alright, I guess, and it had its moments. I did not enjoy the random LOL CLAMP moments near the end of the show though. I probably wouldn’t have missed it if I dropped it. Oh well.

Nodame Cantabile Finale

Surprisingly not bad and pretty well paced, considering this is Chiaki Kon we’re talking about. Unfortunately, she also chose to stick to the manga pretty closely and that means we still got the terrible manga ending. That said, the ending’s probably the worst part of the season, which places it well ahead of Paris Chapter.

Hanamaru Kindergarten

This was a very fun little show and it looks like Gainax put way more effort into the show than they usually do. I liked pretty much all the characters in the show except for Anzu, which is kind of unfortunate because she’s around a lot. Hiiragi is the best character on the show, with Hinagiku and her Yakuza family coming up in second.

Ookamikakushi

Ryukishi07, I am disappoint.

Baka to Test to Shoukanju

I was expecting this to be something terrible like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it actually managed to be pretty entertaining. I guess the way the jokes are written are much more appealing to me than that show I mentioned before. It also gets points for actually using the convoluted battle system premise in an interesting fashion.

Kimi ni Todoke

This went down pretty much like I expected. It’s a really faithful adaptation of the manga and paced just right to reach exactly the right spot to end on. And it was great; easily the best show from Fall 2009. I’m looking forward to a second season in between checking if the next chapter is out yet.

Eden of the East: The King of Eden

This was kind of disappointing. Even though things definitely happened, it felt like nothing was happening at all. I’m aware that it’s really setup for the next movie, but as a movie, it was really, really weak. Just about the only good thing to come out of it is school food punishment’s light prayer single.

So after some buzz on the internets, a movie trailer, a bit of Urbana bus reading and an Asian Kung-fu Generation single, I decided I should probably finish Solanin. And since it’s pretty short, at two volumes and fourteen chapters in each, I managed to do it in one night. And well, Solanin resonated with me to an eery degree. It’s not hard to see why. After all, I’m right at the cusp of entering the life stage that the characters were struggling through.

And it’s sort of the perfect storm of things that I’m thinking about that made me much more receptive to Solanin than I otherwise would have been, even a few months beforehand. It’s just last week that I was deciding whether or not to work my ass off for a shot at grad school instead of staying the course and going into industry after graduation. And it was only a few weeks ago that I felt the mid-coop malaise that I usually get. And then there’s all of the graduation buzz for this year’s graduating class, signaling that my own graduation is only a year away.

Now, my situation is nowhere near as bad as what’s in Solanin. That’s not to say that the situation in Solanin is horrible. What makes it scary is that the things the characters go through is incredibly normal. I’m incredibly lucky to be majoring in something that I’m super interested in, that I’m relatively good at, and that won’t bankrupt me in the future. If I were studying something in which even one of those three criteria weren’t met? I’d imagine I’d be able to relate with the characters a lot more than I already am.

One of my friends joked that it seemed like I was the only one out of our posse with a future. But even then, no matter how well lined up things might seem to us, we’re still wracked with uncertainty and we’re still gazing at the sky while we’re walking, wondering what things are going to be like in a few years. Solanin’s power is in speaking to this part of us that might be buried inside of us. It draws it out and sets it in front of us for us to examine.

Solanin’s story and the reaction it got out of me reminds me of 5 Centimeters per Second. Solanin didn’t affect me emotionally anywhere near the degree that 5cm/s did, which left me in a depressed mood for a day. What 5cm/s did was set off a firestorm of reflection on how I considered relationships of all sorts, not just romantic ones, with distance thrown in. Similarly, Solanin made me think about what I was doing and where I was trying to go with the time that I had left as an undergrad.

It should go without saying that the sort of work that is able to push you to really think about what it’s presenting in the context of your own life rather than that of the characters is rare, powerful, and unnerving.

I was pretty blown away by Gundam Unicorn’s first episode.

I’ve watched a few first episodes of Gundam shows in the past year and I don’t think anything comes close to how I felt while I was watching UC’s first episode. Even though it’s not until pretty recently that I started traversing through what the Universal Century had to offer me, I considered myself a Gundam fan. Even though I was only halfway through Zeta, I could still feel the significance that Unicorn carried in being the first show set in the UC in more than ten years.

I think the production really surprised me. It was way above any other Gundam show I’d seen. 00 may have had HD sparklies, but UC made even GMs in combat look impressive. I was really happy to see the UC style and aesthetic rendered with modern animation techniques and technology. And the music! I want to know why they never got this guy to do music for any other Gundam show before.

Making my way through the Universal Century, something I’ve felt was off was the pacing of the shows. It was only slightly noticeable throughout the original movies and the OVAs, but it became pretty apparent in Zeta. Something about the way events are timed and episodes are constructed really bothers me. I’m assuming it’s just the way shows were written back then, since I felt 0083 flowed more naturally out of everything I’ve seen. Of course, it could be Unicorn’s origins as a novel shining through here. Not only that, but there’s a lot more symbolism in that episode than a lot of Gundam shows that I can remember.

What’s unfortunate is its release schedule. Thinking about it some more, it doesn’t really seem all that far off from a typical OVA schedule, but it still doesn’t make the excruciating wait between episodes and the completion of the series any easier. But, it does look like we’ll have our Kara no Kyoukai equivalent to obsess over every few months for a few days whenever it lands over the next few years.

But yeah, I certainly didn’t expect to start off 2010 with the best first episode of a Gundam show while also being the most impressive thing of the year so far.

It’s probably God’s way of punishing me for reading stupid shoujo manga, but I’ve found that the groups who translate these series often do retarded crap that impedes my ability to read these jpegs that they upload. Groups who scanlate shounen and seinen series don’t tend to do this crap, but if they do, there’s usually someone else who’s able to replace them when they piss people off. Not so with shoujo groups. My suspicion is that it’s because these groups are made up of the same type of undesirables that invented fanlistings and webrings and hang out on DeviantArt.

The thing that magnifies everything I hate about these groups is their policy of not allowing any of their scans on any online viewing sites. Normally, this would not be a problem. I happily grab stuff from ZSS whenever it shows up in my feedreader or whenever their bots get updated. But there’s really no reason to keep people from distributing the stuff. Well, there’s no good reason.

The justification tends to be that the group wants you to view it in the highest quality possible and there’s some sort of mythical compression that ruins their beautiful scans or something. This is retarded, because you’re trying to read a scan of a piece of paper. This isn’t something like digitally ripping a broadcast stream or Blu-ray. You’re scanning paper; it starts out with artifacts.

Of course, I suspect that there’s a lot more wankery and self-aggrandizing crap going on. I remember one group who forced people into their IRC channel to download their stuff so they’d have a huge number of people in the channel. Groups who whine about compression think that compression degrades their amazing work, since they ended up using fancy fonts that would have been unreadable in print and need to be viewed at 1080p.

But the part that is the worst about forcing people to go to their site is that their sites are often an awful Invisionfree board that’s been mangled and skinned for whatever stupid series they’re translating. They don’t have the decency to use Wordpress or Blogger or something that has an RSS feed so I don’t need to visit their labyrinthine forums every day to see if they’ve stopped whining long enough to release something.

Yeah, fansubbers are stupid, but most of them don’t actively try to stop you from watching whatever awful shows they decide to translate poorly. Fansubbers have nothing on scanlators in terms of irritating crap they pull.

It turns out I couldn’t deny the witch anymore.

I’d been fairly charitable throughout most of the anime’s run. I mean, there’s absolutely no way that any studio can adapt Umineko and have everyone be satisfied with the result. It just isn’t possible. So I was willing to give Deen a little slack. Okay, so it has bad animation, but Umineko isn’t known for great art. Okay, so some things aren’t paced well or got cut. I understand, it’s a challenge given the time constraints. Okay, so they remixed awesome tracks for the anime OST but never use them. Wait a second.

Episode 4 was terrible. Unlike the other arcs, there was not one scene throughout the entire Episode that was done well. Episode 1 had its tea party, Episode 2 had its tea party, and Episode 3 had Beatroll.

The weakest parts of every arc have been October 4 and 5, 1986. The problems with the pacing are because they decided to slow down only as much as necessary and to blaze through whatever could have been rushed. So all the mundane, important parts got the time that they needed, while the awesome parts got cut or rushed. And so, a lot of the emotional connection that Umineko has is lost.

The problem is magnified in EP4, where a lot of the story is introducing and fleshing out who Ange is. Ange’s parts of the story are comparable to the very first airport scenes. That is, they’re long, not very exciting, but pretty necessary. With that making up the bulk of the anime’s EP4 and the decision to do it mostly in one shot, the last part of the anime seemed worse than usual.

And what happens when you take all of the character and emotion out of Umineko? It’s just a bunch of tl;dr. It’s not even a coherent mystery that you can solve because there are quite a few things missing from the anime.

The final blow to the Umineko anime is that Deen just isn’t very good. Yeah, the animation is some improvement over Higurashi, but that’s not saying much. The music, even with the zts tracks that people were worried wouldn’t make it in, ended up being a travesty. And, as all Umineko fans are aware, the music of Umineko is a very integral part of the experience.

It’s really disappointing because I was really, really hoping that it’d at least be decent. At least now I know to preemptively be in despair whenever I see Chiaki Kon in the director’s seat (pretty sure Nodame Finale is going to be terribad).