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.

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 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.

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.