A graph first, before anything:

After much delay and procrastination, I finished sola since it was beginning to seem clear to me that Doremi wasn’t interested getting out a release any time soon. It was a rough journey, surely. While it wasn’t the type of anime I’d look back and cringe at for having wasted X hours of my life on (that dubious honour goes to Bokura ga Ita and the Death Note movies), it definitely belongs in the category of “could have been way better”.

I don’t claim to know what makes an anime good. I know what makes an anime good, and it’s definitely not about pandering to the salivating group of moe fanboys that, by some measure of coincidence, have substantial purchasing power. “Good”, of course, is defined as being in reference to my standards, (because I have them! a shocking concept, surely) and it’s just too sad to say that sola, with respects to those standards, weren’t really up to par.

’cause everyone of us has the devil inside

The trainwreck that I thought was sola apparently isn’t. If it manages to keep up its pace there’s even the chance it might escape with a few medium-to-deep cuts and severe bruising, but it made me wait for nine episodes. Made me wait for 9 episodes. That’s as long as 216 minutes. And that’s terrible.

My worst fears about it were confirmed, though — this isn’t a rehash of Kanon alone. It’s like the writer decided to steal elements from both Air and Kanon in order to make what he thought was the grandest mashup ever, only it took the worst possible parts from both, which resulted in something shitty beyond belief. Until recently, that is.

I’d watched till episode 13 last September, by which point Triad decided to take three months to work on episode 14, which made me decide to wait till they’d finished subbing all of it. It was then licensed around March or April, which set me off searching for the remaining 5 episodes, and as the Spring season came all thought of watching it flew out the window till Saturday afternoon.

The lesson here? Don’t rely on Triad for anything (I mean, just look at StrikerS), unless it’s an obscure, non-moe series like Bokurano that no one else wants to sub, which means you’ve got to rely on them anyway. I digress. Higurashi was a mixed bag, although I loved it more than anything, and I’m really looking forward to the next season. Bring on Summer.

I don’t know what’s worse, really — finding out that a show you thought sucked actually becomes quite decent a few episodes later on, or realizing that the promising premise that a show kicks off with was nothing but smoke and mirrors. After watching sola 02 & 03 I think it’s developing into one of the latter, and I might be wrong, as I was before, but this definitely looks like Harem For Dummies.

my eyes were doing a Limp Bizkit at this point. you know, ROLLING ROLLING ROLLING.

This is sad — no subs for Hitohira that aren’t in worthless XviD/mkv form (i.e. all subbers doing double mkv releases need to learn XviD/avi, because it’s redundant and obtuse to have different codecs in the same containers). Neither is anyone doing Kaze no Shoujo Emily, which is sad considering the number of groups swarming over Claymore, Lucky Star, and Gurren-Lagann, all of which don’t really need more than one group subbing it. Especially Gurren-Lagann, because all the groups subbing them totally, utterly suck for not producing something in avi that doesn’t fail miserably.

Mini rant aside, I finally got around to seeing sola, Lovely Complex, and THE MEXICAN GUNS, I mean, El Cazador de la Bruja, which is an mouthful for something that really doesn’t live up to its name, whatever that means — but I’ll get around to that later. The other two were sort-of nice, which isn’t that much considering what they’re up against this season, although it’s pretty decent for wasting time in-between waiting.

While we’re on the topic, let’s not forget how comparing what was meant to be an hour-long (perhaps one and a half, two?) play to a television series adaptation spanning a likely 26 episodes, is ridiculous. I mean, ridiculous on a scale of comparing all twelve volumes of Death Note to the two 45+ minute movie adaptations and gnashing your teeth while going “THEY TOTALLY SHAFTED THE FANS, I WANT MY MELLO/NEAR/OBSCURE SIDE CHARACTER/ANIME-EXCLUSIVE YAOI FOOT WASHING SCENE”. So let’s not get into that.

Since we’re going for the jugular, why not stop too with the Gonzo bashing for a second to realise that, shock and horror: judging an anime based on its predecessors’ performance, and the animation studio responsible for said predecessors, is pretty dumb. No, maybe exceedingly blind is a better way of putting it. If you thought the KyoAni fans were bad enough, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a victim of shoddy plot, form over function, exceedingly short-sighted expectations, and jaded cynicism — the Gonzo hater.