It was an entertaining episode, I’ll grant you that. As a good blogger’s duty’s all about highlighting underrated shows that might have dropped off the radar as a result of underexposure or consistency (with Bamboo Blade coming to mind), when I take into consideration how episode 17 brought to light the series’ strengths very well, I feel duty-bound to write about it as a result. But what is this show about, anyway?

To my knowledge, the general idea that those who aren’t interested in it have is that it seems to be just another, milder, member of the fetish persuasion, nevermind how the example I linked to is already so far gone that I’m using it ironically here. For all the “I have no idea why, but FUCK YES I’M WATCHING A GIRLY SHOW!” fans there’s the intially-nonplussed ones to balance them out, and if you’re in the latter group and reading this, here’s the hard sell in a paragraph:

At its basics, Shugo Chara is about believing in yourself that believes in you. It’s all about doing the impossible, seeing the invisible, touching the untouchable, and breaking the unbreakable. Yes, I just compared it to Gurren Lagann. No, you’re not going to get much sense out of that statement until you read further, so hold your bile for the end.

It’s going to be difficult to attempt and write about Gurren Lagann without inevitably degenerating into one of those awestruck rants about its sense of monumental scale, as everything screams BIG, from a given character’s aspirations (”All the stars in the sky are enemies”), to the galaxy-flinging antics of the final episode, to the music (”Do the impossible”), but I’m going to try anyway.

Since my moments are inevitably memorable because they made me shed tears in varying degrees, you’d think it wouldn’t be hard to guess what I’m going to write about here. No, it wasn’t Kamina’s death, although its impact was felt several episodes later and ranks among the best, if not most defining death of 2007. It wasn’t Kittan’s death, which was sad but not tragic. It wasn’t even Nia’s fading away, despite that being a grand send-off for a character I initially had the impression of as being exposition tool/Simon pick-me-up.

It was a sunset. Not just any sunset, mind you, but the sunset first seen in episode 01 as Kamina, Simon, and Yoko break through the surface of Jeeha Village. That sunset was reproduced to amazing effect later in episode 21, and it’s this very scene that made me weep as much as, say, Kanata’s backstory in Lucky Star, or Jun’s farewell to Kana in Bokurano. I’m still wondering what hit me then.

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…

This post is obviously meant to be inflammatory from the title! I mean, there could be no other reason for using “arrogance”, could there? This post also obviously refers to every fansubber out there and not a select few who are concerned. Please keep that in mind as you read this post, and before you proceed to comment. Take every word I say out of context. It’s not like I tend to be sarcastic on the internet or anything, nope.

I may not agree with what you say, but I�ll defend to the death my right to drill it