The comments on this post were cute. Specifically, though, I’d like to commend Higevs, Xerox, and lKnight for taking the bait. My mention of “magnum opus” was deliberately provocative, utterly random, though not without careful forethought and really a point I meant to expand on in this post; it was interesting, other post comments aside, to see what the term really means to each of them, and how their taste influenced their criteria for such judgement.

while light shows juxtaposed on serious ones make for hilarity…

sadly, a couple of token appearances just didn’t cut it

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.

Now that the two main first impressions posts are over, I guess I can start to slack off or something. There isn’t a whole lot that I’m expecting in the shounen, action-packed side, but that might be due to how I don’t carry a lot of expectations with me when I watch new shows, unless it’s been hyped to death before its debut. Between you and me, though, I’d take this over the overtly romance/harem stuff I’m due to watch next.

Dragonaut -The Resonance- was concentrated awesome, like Code Geass all over again. It’s one of those anime that you immediately hate or love, and I’m falling hard for this little gem. Dragonaut has everything — a fairly original premise, a hero you can’t help but feel for in his wretched state, a heroine that will have feminists everywhere giving their unanimous approval, and a cast that doesn’t scream “clich�” as much as you’d think those well-endowed girls would be prone to.

Or that muscular, chest-baring guy for that matter, in case anyone’s accusing me of being sexist, which is something Dragonaut couldn’t be found guilty of. To my mild annoyance and amusement, the guys have gone naked more often than the girls have so far (2-1), and as the picture below might indicate, it isn’t the guy that’s brimming with natural, world-changing powers in a bid to save the poor damsel in distress; rather, the inverse is true, which made for hilarious role-reversal when Toa (the girl) carried Jin (the failure guy)to safety before having an epic fight with that Berserker clone.

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)

This was inspired by the slew of StrikerS episodes (18-24) that yesy decided to release this whole month. Naturally, the idea for a dialogue came to mind due to the mind-blowing, epic quality of said episodes, so I got introspect of transientem and Roxas of a stone and a small ripple to talk about our favourite White Devil.

There should be two other dialogue threads by both Roxas and introspect after this one; part of why I wanted to do this dialogue thing was the lack of attention and/or bad publicity that StrikerS has been getting from the anime blogosphere as a whole. The only blogs talking about them are the episode summary ones, and not a lot of them at that.

I hope to get people thinking with this series of dialogues: are the reasons they’re disliking StrikerS reasonable or sound by any definition? What is the Nanoha series all about? Has the latest instalment in the series really been sucking, or is it just the obtuse English-speaking anime fanbase and their kneejerk reaction to something new? With regards to the last question, I’ve always regarded the latter as being the case, but I digress. On with the discussion.

Numerous spoilers after the cut.

You knew this was coming. Come on. Come on. Only the weak chicken out after a few episodes of “boring” training. I don’t know, maybe the Time-Space Administration Bureau could have invented something called the Amplifying Rapid Growth Hormone during the 10 year timeskip, thus enabling the possibility of an epic battle like Nanoha A’s in the second episode?! The first episode, obviously, would have our four young ones being injected with said ARGH.

It would’ve been lame, though, to see battle after battle at the beginning without any reason to care for the characters’ beam spam and transformation scenes. As a result of the especially long and, according to some quarters, difficult episodes where NOTHING HAPPENS, people began to whine. The only other feasible option would have to be putting the training scenes in flashbacks during the battles, but who wants to see Teana thinking about the time she got her ass kicked by Nanoha for fudging up a battle session right in the middle of war when you can see it first-hand?

I know I wouldn’t. As a result of all that getting to know the new cast during the 10-odd episodes so far, the few battles so far have been gripping. It says something when you cheer silently or burst into loud exclamations at what’s happening on-screen, not because you’re being noisy, but because you care about the characters and what might or might not happen to them. This is also why the battles in Harry Potter 7 were the best ever — it wasn’t so much the writing as it was what was at stake. Anyone could die and faced a very real possibility of being snuffed out as you turned the page.

Been ages since my last StrikerS post, but that’s got nothing to do with how I found the Teana-emo arc immensely entertaining. Yeah, if it isn’t apparent already, I’m not one of those whiners who constantly rag on StrikerS for being “boring”, because it’s been gaining considerable momentum, and what better way to get things going than to remind the viewers of its roots with episodes 07 to 09? I still stick by my prediction of no proper action till the halfway mark.

Of course it isn’t a real arc per se, I’m just sayin’. I mentioned returning to its roots because the past three episodes were marked by a not-too-obvious return to the emotional side of things, which originally was all about Nanoha wanting to befriend the shit out of her enemies. Only that this time the cast has been doing mostly nothing but training and all that administrative crap since StrikerS began, interspersed with two short battles. How’s there a back to basics then?

About the title. This is to save some of you the effort of reading through this: there isn’t any, at least not with respects to Code Geass — if you’re one of those who think it is, excuse me while I pause to laugh and make fun of your crap anime that you think is superior to it, like Gravitation or Sister Princess, Loveless or Ichigo 100%. You can press Ctrl+W now.

To those of you who’re reading on, well, I loved it. What can I say? While my eyes were suffering towards the end (like yours would too if you’d watch 23 episodes over three days), my mind was revelling in the sheer quality of it all. As I mentioned previously I loved the unoriginal premise — an unsubtle blend of Gundam SEED and Death Note. Kira (Yamato) + Kira, anyone? It’s more likely than you think!

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.

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.

Late Nanoha fan here. Think it was the beginning of this year or around November last, when I kept on seeing a recurring face among the posts of /a/. Some hushed whispers about it being QUALITY, and there was all manner of Photoshopped pictures on blogs everywhere. After awhile I couldn’t stand it and decided to get the two seasons to see what the fuss was all about. It reminded me of Cardcaptor Sakura, what with the magical staffs and all.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nanoha is the type of series that comes along ever so often and reinvents the genre wheel. The tag “post-mahoushoujo” comes to mind, because, like Touhou, the stigma that once came along with adoration of little girls with magical powers — it’s all gone now. Well, maybe the little girl part still is stigmatized, but it’s generally okay nowadays for a young adolescent male to go about singing praises of an anime rooted in the series.