This has been a week of surprises. Claymore 03 was great, and I guess I shouldn’t have compared Clare to good ol’ Abel Nightroad back then, but hindsight is 20/20. So Abel was an all-or-nothing guy who wasn’t in any real danger throughout because he was only using 40% of his power whenever he got his ass kicked, and when he wasn’t kicking ass with 80% nanomachines he was getting killed.

I kinda wish every anime blogger out there did this, and not the usual “oh, the pilot sucked, that must mean the whole series must automatically suck, too! opinions! words! el oh el!” that accompanies the beginning of every season*. Snap judgements — I don’t know why we even bother with them, really. The whole point of first impressions would be to get a general feel of the show, not the next 12 or 25 episodes that are going to air, but that’s why lolikit’s contemplating doing a Shinji right now by running away on us. Bastard.

the first rule of sword anime: the protagonist must get impaled at least once

Like Bokurano’s first death, I wasn’t expecting that at all. The other surprise of the episode was “I can behave like a prostitute” “PROSTITUTE!?” “yeah, wanna see?” “no thanks *blush*”. I think I might just grow to like this.

Also, the conversation Raki had with Clare after her cover was almost blown reminded me of a certain sword-toting protagonist from this series that was popular during the 90s. Though it’s a pity how Raki x Clare would never really seem possible, canon even, given how Kenshin was fully human and didn’t have a monster within him and all.

On a lighter note, Darker than Black is still exceeding expectations — with one snag. See the thing is that what it’s doing now, giving us complete short stories in sets of two by two, is great. I have no problems with it whatsoever, and I think it’s a great throwback to the old precedence of story over art quality, back in the day where the animation wasn’t anything to write home about (Evangelion looked horribly dated in ‘02, although Escaflowne, which made its debut a few months after, didn’t).

Yet people are perceiving it to be gimmicky — there goes that word again — as if retaining the same approach throughout would be wrong or something. Alright, so instead of something different, i.e. non-stop alternate story/action episodic mini-arcs, you’d rather have the standard structure everyone’s tired of? If Darker than Black took the usual Intro - Story - Battle 01 - Filler - Battle 02 - Filler/Onsen - Climax - Ending path that’s been done to death so far, I doubt it could convey so powerful a story.

Episode 03 managed once again to raise all manner of questions. While Mai’s blanked-out eyes and unconscious actions seemed to resemble Doll-like behaviour at the beginning, I quickly perished the thought. Glad to see that the small things are still there — Mai holding the Parent’s Day invitation, the unexplained, yet obvious contracts (so Hei’s was eating after all), the discreet swapping of watches.

and then manifest though my actions deep adoration for your being

When you watch an anime, do you judge its value according to individual episodes, or the story as a whole? I find a lot of people doing the former nowadays and while I’d like to say that what they’re doing is right, I mean, this is patently ridiculous and post-modernist — I’ll digress for a second here to explain — what that basically means, in relevance to anime, is the rejection of any existence of a storyline, which in effect results in the valuation of a series based on individual episodes since there’s no meaning to be found as a whole.

That sounds absurd for a lot of reasons: a series basically is a story told over four to eight hours in episodes; almost every type of genre bar the slice of life ones have plot progression of some sort; it makes no sense for people to assume that the value of an anime lies in each and every episode, not the thing as a whole — but it happens! I don’t know about you, but when people make comments like those, it makes me sick of being smack in the middle of the instant gratification age — if you really want each episode to “not suck”, how about you stop downloading and wait for the damn thing to finish before you start complaining?

Wait, that won’t work. Although it may sound dumb on paper, how many anime bloggers out there actually fall prey to this ever so often? When I was doing a Kanon marathon I wasn’t concerned with any perceived drops in animation quality, how “this week’s animation sucked”, or how there “wasn’t anything happening” — I just couldn’t care less, but it saddens me that this mentality is becoming pervasive. Damn your post-modernist approach to Darker than Black, go do it with Lucky Star instead.

*I’m aware of the irony here if you’re talking about MEXICAN GUNS, but it was an exception since I’m still traumatized from abuse of the gun aesthetic to say nothing of how Kajiura repulsed me through horrid music placement from the get go.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the structuralist in me wants to read some KareKano. All 12 volumes of it. That’s right, bitches, in order, and I won’t vent in-between volumes about how the previous one sucked because I’m such a rebel..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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