The number of posts don’t seem to be letting up any time soon. Ditto this. While I’m officially semi-tired of all the true tears discussion that’s been going on as of late, I still consider it to be awesome even if I’m kind burnt out from people talking about it — you know what they say about too much of a good thing. When was the last time something from this maligned genre provoked so much discussion and dissection, on such a rich level, too? I can understand the rationale behind Shinkai not making that leap from movies to a TV series, if only somewhat.

It happened previously to me with ef, and I don’t know why getting burnt out on discussion about a good anime happens, because it technically shouldn’t. Maybe everyone’s already repeating what I already know, and I can’t be arsed to comment, even if I’ve read their posts. Maybe I like talking about a series better when it’s indie, although that wouldn’t explain Clannad. Maybe I need to read less blogs, even if this goes against what I believe about reading more. But I digress.

This rather lengthy dialogue I had with Mike of AnimeDiet was conducted last Sunday, under the guise of dissecting what I felt was the core theme of both kimikiss and true tears, and what makes them such a powerful experience: character inconsistency, and the difference between what a character feels and what he or she subsequently demonstrates. That part’s still there, but it’s buried in a plethora of other stuff, all of which I came up on the fly. The second half of this dialogue is linked to at the end of this post.

Happy Chinese New Year to those of you descended from the motherland, and may you collect more of those delicious red packets this festive season. I spent the reunion dinner eve in bed, with a majority of the New Year’s Day going towards getting more sleep in view of my erratic nocturnal schedule. While part of me felt like Nobita in that chapter of Doraemon where he decides to spend the first day of the new year in his room with gadgets in lieu of real human company, I figured trying it just this once wouldn’t hurt.

obligatory picture since it’s the year of Yuki Sohma the Mouse

In other news, the discussion over at In Search of Number Nine and a later post by Cameron Probert reminded me that I should stick to this rule in 2008: If comments don’t achieve their required effect after the first one, taking it to a post would be more productive given the growing length.

Relax, kuro, we understand j00. In case you have difficulty in deciphering the gist of this post due to my verbosity, here’s Cliff Notes for you: It’s like casting pearls before swine. Which is my passive-aggressive, catty and unnecessarily confrontational way of saying either “What is wrong with you, true tears is excellent, get out”, or “If you think Winter is trash and you haven’t seen true tears, please end your life now.” Of course, I say it by means of a large post like this since for all my efforts to take this to be the gospel truth like the ardent fanboy I am, I still have to maintain a civil fa�ade all purposes aside.

Call it a man’s gut instinct (intuition is for women), but true tears seems hardly like the type of thing to go wrong any time soon: it’s so pretty, and no, I won’t stop talking about the animation until you, my reader, watch it, if you’re one of the unfortunate few that haven’t. You could surely write this off as another star-struck fan rambling about the glitz behind this diamond in the rough, this rose among thorns, but hey, it’s the director of Simoun at work, and whatever he did that was good about the series, he’s brought the magic around to play.

I expect true tears to be one of those shows that I come away from consistently wowed everytime, and to crown it “Anime of the Year” seems like a daring feat to be sure, but I know what I’m talking about. true tears is, to be honest, very much like the girl (or guy, for the ladies) that you meet one day who strikes you as just so damn attractive for a number of compelling reasons, all of which you can only begin to describe in detail later. When love strikes it strikes hard, leaves you babbling, and it’s only when you pick up the pieces later can you barely decipher the reasons for falling in such a chemistry-charged, primal manner.

A short update for those of you who were wondering where my blog went, and why Sasa’s feed was flooding AnimeNano earlier: Ikimashou.net is currently in the hands of a squatter, no thanks to the registrar screwing Randall over by conveniently “forgetting” to e-mail him about the domain lapsing. As a result, everything broke, and he’s fighting to get the domain back now. In the meantime, don’t bother updating your links, unless you feel like changing them later on. If this Dasaku.net domain turns out to be permanent, I’ll be using a different subdomain name to go with it in good time.

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but Hirose looks a lot like Yuki Nagato