All posts by draggle

C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control 04 — Unborn Children

C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control,

I suppose this episode was decent, but I’m still underwhelmed by this show. The characters are just boring. Let’s face it: the teacher from this episode, who will probably never appear again, and even the convenience store manager are more interesting than Kimimaro, Souichiro, and Mashu combined. Souichiro has the potential to become more interesting once they look into his background, I suppose. But Kimimaro is just weak, and Mashu is just there floating around inside her card and complaining.

The part of this episode about the teacher’s children was interesting. Losing your future doesn’t mean losing your life. It sounds like the suicides were actually side effects of losing something else. It’s probably significant that the main character’s father didn’t lose his wife or children. Hopefully we can avoid several episodes of emoness for being unloved by his father.

The battles in this episode were definitely nice though (especially the last one). Well, at least they looked nice. I have no idea what was actually going on since it was all economics gibberish. Since Souichiro invested in Mashu, I’m guessing that means he takes most of their profit now? Souichiro’s group seems pretty decent if they want to minimize the effects of the Financial District in the real world. Let’s hope it isn’t that straightforward and they actually have some secret evil plan. We still have no idea what the Midas money does in the real world.

Hidan no Aria 04 — What Just Happened?

Hidan no Aria,

This came completely out of left field, but this last episode of Aria was absolutely amazing. The first three episodes had me shuffling the show away in the refuse bin of Shakugan no Shana retakes, but then an episode like this comes along and blows my mind. Ok, so Kugimiya Rie’s little girl voice is as annoying as ever, and the Holmes / Lupin thing is retarded, but I’m willing to put that aside based on everything else in this episode.

First of all, Riko is an excellent character. I would say she’s an excellent villain but I don’t feel that she’ll remain one for long. Her evil plotting skills are top-notch. Her insanity is super high-level. She has two faces, one demure and ditzy and one pure evil. She’s even good at seduction. I complained last season about how Kyoko from Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka failed as a crazy bitch, but everything they did wrong with Kyoko was just right for Riko. In case it isn’t obvious, I’m a big fan of this character type.

I never thought I’d be saying this either, but the background on Aria that was revealed this episode was great too. How often do you see a character who lives alone because her mother is in prison? (Now if only mercenaries and government officials here in America had the same level of accountability here in America as they do in Aria…)

Kinji’s brief stint in Hysteria mode was awesome as well. We really need to get more of it. The thing is, if this show could have less of Aria and her super-annoying voice it would actually be really good. This episode showed that it can be great even in spite of her voice. Let’s hope it keeps going in this direction.

With Moshidora’s sobfest, continuing excellence from Ano Hana, a spike in quality from C, and now this, today set some pretty spectacular standards for a single day of releases. If they keep it up this season will be one of the best we’ve had in a long while.

(note: I’m not going to start blogging Aria, just felt like commenting on this one episode)

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai 04 — Crossdressing

Ano Hana,

Another excellent episode of Ano Hana. I appreciate series that mange to intersperse serious moments with comedy, and this show is doing quite well at it. The first meeting at the clubhouse was a good example of this: as everyone is searching for Menma and there’s tension over whether they believe each other or not, Menma is also searching for herself and disappointed not to find her. The way the show handled Jinta’s seeing ghosts was excellent as well: usually in this situation the person who sees the ghost would try to make everyone else believe it’s real, but here, Jinta is much more reasonable and instead doubts whether Menma exists himself.

Both Tsurumi and Matsuyuki, who had been sidelined up to this point, begin to develop and become strong characters in this episode. The best description of Tsurumi is probably Hisakawa’s “mysterious girl”, although you can tell that she is worried about Matsuyuki. She didn’t seem too concerned about Jinta seeing ghosts, but now that I think about it, that’s probably because of Matsuyuki’s hobby. The only part that she didn’t believe from his story was that Menma made the cookies, not that he saw Menma.

Crossdressers tend to be overused in anime, but Matsuyuki is one of the few portrayals (along with the characters of Hourou Musuko) that I can actually buy. The thing is that Matsuyuki isn’t a crossdresser in general, he is Menma. He has (I presume) a longing for Menma, not a desire to wear female clothes. That kind of desire is much more compelling than a desire to go to a girl’s school or the far more common lack of any reason whatsoever.

Steins; Gate 05 — Hououin Makes Girls Cry

Steins; Gate,

This episode had some plot development, but was mostly an opportunity to further develop the relationship between Hououin and Christina. I can appreciate that decision, since the two of them are just so much fun to watch together. My favorite moment was their posing in lab coats. A pose of radiant intelligence indeed! Hououin also has an amazing evil laugh, the best I’ve seen since Lelouch. His reaction to CERN’s conspiracy is equally awesome: instead of stopping their plot to change the future, he wants to beat them to it.

It seems that Christina had some issues with her father in the past, but for once they don’t beat us over the head with it but have it revealed through Hououin’s aggressiveness. The show’s characterization so far has been great — even the CRT store girl is becoming interesting. The only exception seems to be Mayuri, whose main role is to act cute. She’s probably batshit insane, but not in a very interesting way compared to the rest of the characters. Hopefully she will have a chance to develop soon.

The mystery further deepens as we learn that Christina and CRT girl will become enemies in the future. One question is what Christina will do, but for me the more pressing question is how does CRT girl know this? Is she from the future (perhaps John Titor)? She did just recently appear at the shop and seems to know about the IBN 5100. The more likely candidate for John Titor is the cell phone girl though. I should mention that if this show ever ends up having any action scenes, it’s going to be awesome. Just seeing CRT girl jump back and crouch was intense. Imagine what they’ll do with a full blown fight.

Although Steins; Gate has overall done an excellent job at building a conspiracy based on “history” and good pseudoscience, there were a few gaping inconsistencies in this episode. First of all: our favorite super hacker is copying a JPEG file from the IBN 5100. The JPEG spec was invented long after 1972. Besides, the IBN 5100 displays characters, not pixels. Is CERN supposed to be looking at the JPEGs converted to ASCII art? Second, Christina claims that the humans become squeezed out like a sponge because they’re compressing 10-21 grams into 10-19 meters (according to the translation I have). Let’s assume she means cubic meters and that they aren’t converting matter into a single dimension, since that probably would squeeze some stuff out. Then the process is achieving a density of one hundredth of a gram per cubic meter. The density of air is about 1 kg /m3. So the density that’s squeezing everything out of the matter is a whopping 10-5 times the density of air.

Hanasaku Iroha 05 — Balut!

Hanasaku Iroha,

It was quite satisfying seeing Minko get a taste of her own insults. Hopefully this won’t dissuade her from further creativity.

I thought that the love triangle around Tohru was a bit forced, and it turns out that’s because it didn’t exist. 🙂   I’m very pleased with this development, and I’m siding with Ohana here: I don’t see how anyone could like that guy. But it was nice seeing Ohana make a fool of herself.

I am wondering though if they decided to have Ohana and Minko make peace a bit too soon. This is a two course show they’re going to need some more drama, and Minko was a very nice source for this. I’m hoping that they don’t go the route of the grandmother’s “joke” in saving the inn from being closed since this trope has been done to death so many times in the past. It seems that in the immediate future Ohana’s friend Ko will be making a visit, so this should spice things up.

I was quite surprised to see this week that the author actually made a good addition to the cast as part of the inn’s staff. I half expected him to be squirreled away in the background for the remainder of the show, but his creative interpretations were the driving force for much of this episode. He complements Tomoe (the woman in the pink kimono above) well in terms of rumormongering.