What I mean by “the point of adaptations” isn’t “the point where adaptations start sucking”, but more of like “what is the point of adaptations?” After all, regardless of how good or bad an adaptation will be, you’ll always have the grassroots insisting on the superiority of the original. The fanbase is fickle and insatiable, which means most, if not all of the discussions will result in a discordant clamour of “YOU NEVER SAW HOW BRILLIANT THE MANGA WAS”, or “YOU’RE BIASED BECAUSE YOU READ IT FIRST”.

Which brings me to two shows, both brilliant manga in their own domains: Bokurano and Claymore. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to review the anime for both seeing how they’re both based off a manga; furthermore, I’ve only read the manga for Claymore, and only saw the anime adaptation of Bokurano. So I have two questions:

What can be really constituted as perception bias? How should an adaptation from its source material, be it a visual novel, manga, or light novel, be truly judged? I find these questions to be of utmost relevance especially in this Autumn season for the top-tier, or at least what I perceive as the fandom perceiving as top-tier anime, i.e. Clannad and Shana II, happen to be adaptations too.

I saw the Shakugan no Shana movie yesterday before starting on the first episode of Shakugan no Shana II, and I’m glad I did. Aside from refreshing my memory on the whole series and whatnot, it also proved to be a timely reminder on why I’ve always adored the Shana series so much, and no, it has nothing to do whatsoever with her being a tsundere, I swear.

while I don’t see this happening in the canon anytime soon, the catfights have been upped a notch from where we left it, which is always a plus for me (click for hi-res version)

Going through a period of chronic exhaustion while forcing myself to write this post hasn’t exactly been pleasant thanks to my lack of knowledge about Claymore itself — but that all fell away when I finally decided to read all 12 volumes of the manga yesterday morning. Fun times.

I came away from the aftermath shaken, not stirred. The clock said 6:00AM. Do I have any regrets about “spoiling” the story now that I know what’s going to happen in the anime? Maybe just a little. As far as I’m concerned, though, it’s all for the best, as it was an enjoyable experience, to say nothing of how it won’t be as hard to write about it from now on. Largely spoiler-free.

not a coincidence, really (click for full size)

I forgot to comment on Claymore 06’s shounen character development (those two terms in the same sentence, wow), when it aired, so here’s a little something to make up for it. No, that wasn’t taken out of context at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about, really.

years after Claymore is dead and buried under the avalanche of new anime this picture will persist, and someone will get the idea that it was about kinky exhibitionist lesbian paedophile knights during medieval times, and find out they were only half-wrong.

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.

Claymore’s apparently scheduled for 50 episodes, and I’m torn on whether to follow something that doesn’t suck in theory, but doesn’t really do anything for me either, in practice. I’ve heard that it gets better as the manga goes on, but fifty? With a chance that it might get better because they didn’t want to get you into the plot at the very beginning? It’s a pity, but I guess it can’t be helped given the number of volumes they’ve got to adapt.

An issue I have with Claymore is that it reeks of a certain vampire anime some time ago, that had a major failure of an ending due to the writer of the light novels dying, God bless his soul — the medieval setting only makes it worse because while the amalgam of steampunk and post-apocalypse tech in Trinity Blood was at least made refreshing since there was a power balance, medieval just cries out SHOUNEN DYNAMICS due to the sole dependence on physical power, which means a lot of fighting, losing, training, and then winning before losing again to a new challenger. Rinse, repeat.