Hidan no Aria 05 — Wow

Hidan no Aria,

This episode redefined the meaning of the word terrible. I actually praised Hidan no Aria’s last episode, mainly because of Riko, but this time I couldn’t forgive the nonsensical plot and actions of the characters even with Riko and Kinji in hysteria mode.

Let’s look at what happens this episode. Aria gets shot, and to treat her wound, Kinji takes off her clothes, straddles her, and gives her an injection. I’m pretty sure this is not how you should treat bullet wounds. Then Aria immediately wakes up, and does the usual routine of yelling at him for being a pervert. Her voice is one of the most annoying things I’ve ever heard. Kinji kisses her to enter hysteria mode.

Riko finds them, and they team up on her and cut her hair (Kinji cuts a bullet in half with his sword). Riko enters Medusa mode, and then runs away. Later, Kinji corners Riko on the plane where she has surrounded herself with bombs. She blows the wall out, jumps out of the plane, pulls off her school uniform, and uses it as a parachute. At this point I completely lost it. Riko quickly follows up with a missile barrage which precisely takes out two engines. I guess those were hidden in her uniform too.

From this point it only gets worse, as Aria and Kinji collaborate with their classmates to land the plane. The government, to control damage to their image, decides it’s better to shoot down the plane themselves than to let it potentially crash land at the airport. Whoever made that decision had better get sacked after this.

The next ten minutes are a snoozefest of radio calls and looking at the fuel meter. When they land at the school ten minutes later, their classmates have prepared hundreds of spotlights powered by their own individual windmills to light the way to the landing strip. Right. The remainder of the episode is some corny drama about Aria leaving again, getting stopped at the last minute and jumping out of a flying helicopter. (I’m sure there’s more to complain about in there, but I wasn’t really paying attention anymore).

I’m actually thinking about picking this show up mid-season for blogging— it sucks, but there’s certainly a lot to say about it. If next weeks episode is either good or terrible I’ll probably pick it up, if it’s average I won’t.

Ano Hana 05 — As Tears Go By

Ano Hana,

Lots of crying this episode. I wouldn’t say it was over the top though, they were certainly appropriate times to cry, aside from Menma’s fit at the end.  She’s a little kid though so we can forgive her. Matsuyuki’s tears were tears of MANLINESS that only someone wearing a dress can shed, so that’s all good. And Anaru almost got raped so getting teary-eyed is ok.

I really liked how they dealt with Matsuyuki’s cross-dressing in this episode. In most other shows everyone would be making fun of the guy who cross-dressed. But aside from the intial shock, his friends are actually really supportive. Anaru calls him a cross-dresser and runs away from him, but you can tell her heart isn’t in it. And Matsuyuki’s relationship with Jinta has actually improved from revealing his hobby. This is really the reaction that makes the most sense, and it’s nice to have such reasonable and accepting characters.

As for Anaru, she really needs to ditch those “friends” of hers. Talk about bitches. I didn’t think anyone played the “maybe we shouldn’t be friends with you” game after elementary school. Tsurumi’s observation about both Anaru and Matsuyuki needing to change clothes was spot on. I’m really looking forward to the episodes featuring Tsurumi. Hopefully they’ll let her become something more than just the smart person. Same thing goes for Hisakawa except without being smart.

The extra segment from the past was not what I was expecting. A love quadrangle among eight year olds. I have difficulty imagining children of that age falling in love, much less feeling the same way more than five years later. Perhaps this is more reflective of me than the anime. But regardless, the future flashbacks are going to need more temporal variety. I feel that they need to look at more than the day of Menma’s death to fully flesh out the characters’ past relationships.

Moshidora Review — B

Reviews,

Long title: What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s Management. The premise doesn’t seem very promising, but the show did manage to come together nicely. It’s quite corny, there’s no getting around that, but the show has a certain earnestness and straightforwardness which makes me forgiving of the cheesy drama and predictable events. It’s like the creators know the show is corny, but instead of trying to gloss over it they just face it head on. I found it kind of refreshing.

The highlight for me was the segments involving Drucker’s book. We learn about marketing, the customers, and innobetion. It’s hilarious how all of the baseball team managers end up getting their own copy and quote from it like it’s the Gospel. All with their curious pronunciation of key words. 🙂

The characters are interesting, but don’t all get enough time to develop in the short length of the show. I don’t think that much could have been done about this. The characters do tend to be rather corny again, but I find that part of the charm. Yuki is is the stereotypical kind sickly girl, Minami is mostly average all around and hates baseball for the corniest reason imaginable, freckle boy is a nervous wreck,  etc. My personal favorite is Ayano, whose main line is “Um. Ah. Hai”.

The corniness did cross the line on the second to last episode, though, when the whole cast spent the entire episode wailing. Minami’s ranting also made no sense whatsoever. I felt that this was by far the weakest point of the entire show and completely out of place in a show which was otherwise entirely upbeat. Fortunately in the final episode it managed to recover its mood, but the damage was already done. The creators seemed to also entirely forget about Drucker for the last few episodes, which made for some of the best segments originally.

  • Plot / Script – 9 / 10 – Corny but overall solid.
  • Characters – 8 / 10 – Again, solid, but not too much depth.
  • Production – 8 / 10 – Not spectacular, but decent and consistent.
  • Overall – B

Recommendations – Giant Killing, Kamichu

Steins; Gate 06 — D-Mail

Steins; Gate,

Christina has some terrible naming sense. They had a list of pretty decent names— Nostalgia Mail, the Mail that Leapt through Time, DeLorean mail— and she decides to go with D-mail. Shorter is not necessarily better. But naming sense aside, the dialogue in this show continues to be top notch. It just flows really smoothly, in spite / because of Okarin’s ridiculous comments.

We get another beautiful evil laugh from Okarin as well. His voice actor deserves an award for this. I still can’t believe it’s the same guy who did Setsuna F. Seiei, my least favorite character of all time. I guess it goes to show that voice acting isn’t everything.

Now for the conspiracy theories. I’m wondering if Moeka Kiryuu (cellphone girl) is John Titor. She is looking for the IBN 5100 after all, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she posted on message boards. Seems a bit too obvious but you never know. Suzuha (CRT girl) also seems to be from the future, but I can’t really see her as being John Titor. She doesn’t appear to care about the IBN 5100 and seems too genuinely horrified about Christina. Perhaps Okarin actually succeeds at time travel and Christina does something using it, and Suzuha was sent to prevent it.

Moeka gives me a bad feeling though, since she appears to know more than they do about time travel, asking about the FB. It kind of makes you wonder if she is with CERN (or has some other evil intentions). Although I doubt CERN would need to look for an IBN 5100… perhaps she wants to stop CERN but to go to some other extreme in controlling the future. Overall the conspiracy is continuing to develop nicely, but is being set on the backburner to the great dialogue and character development.

Hanasaku Iroha 06 — Cosplay

Hanasaku Iroha,

This episode brings some light on Ohana’s uncle as he brings in an outside consultant to inspire some innobetion in marketing at the inn (I should have a review of Moshidora up soon). This consists of making the waiting staff dress up in revealing outfits. When their china dresses do not go over well with the young family visiting the inn, Ohana tries to convince her grandmother that the reason is because the slits weren’t long enough. Fortunately, the manager understands what the customers want better than Ohana.

The development of Ohana’s uncle was good— I was wondering what he did at the inn, and kind of felt bad for him for staying there at his age. At least he still has dreams for improvement. His friend from college was annoying, but fortunately she didn’t stick around for long. We also see that the grandmother had similar ideas for improvements when she was young. I’m guessing they won’t really get into the relationship between the grandmother and Ohana’s mother until the second half, but when they do we should be in for a treat.

We have switched though from the excellent drama in the first few episodes into cute girls acting cute / fanservice mode. Not to say the creators aren’t doing well at having cute girls acting cute: the show is doing an excellent job at this. But I personally prefer the drama. I’m guessing they’ll probably get back to it eventually.