In the first episode of Hanasaku Iroha, Ohana moves from the city to her grandma’s hot springs hotel in the country after her mother flees their home.

This show is looking quite promising. I thought that going to live in the hot spring hotel would be a happy experience, and she would make friends and have lots of fun and this would be another show about cute girls doing cute things. Boy was I wrong. Her grandmother is harsh and forces her to work, and the employees there are not nice either, especially her roommate Minko who hates her.  In short she’s absolutely miserable. This seems like it may be a show that will actually have some bite (although I don’t doubt that she will eventually grow to get along with everyone). But don’t get friendly, get even. I really want to see Ohana stick it to her grandmother and Minko now.

The confession scene was one of the better ones I’ve seen as well— having it on the slide in the playground and making Ohana fall down at the end was a nice touch. You could see his desperation and Ohana’s confusion well, and it didn’t seem forced like most of those scenes do.

My main concern is that in the first half of this episode, Ohana’s monologues were walking the thin line between intelligence and pretentiousness. This disappeared in the second half once she got to work though, so it’s hard to tell how much of an issue this will be in the rest of show. I’m considering blogging this, depending on what else is on Sunday and how the next episode goes.

A few segments were funny, in particular the dropped food segment and everything with Sasahara-senpai, but most of this episode’s humor fell flat for me. Especially the segments with Nano and the Professor— they’re just walking around being cute, but it isn’t funny at all. The segments with Mio, Yuuko and Mai are much stronger.

I’m not going to blog this, but I’ll probably keep watching it. Actually, my enjoyment of this episode was ruined because I had peeked at the manga already and read most of this episode’s jokes. Except I forgot that I had read it, and thought that this episode was just stealing footage from the OVA (I glanced through the OVA again and confirmed that this wasn’t the case). Anyway, the lesson is: don’t read the manga beforehand if you want to be surprised.

Shinku, a Parkour master and middle school student from Japan, is summoned to a fantasy world to be a hero in a war between cats and dogs. The dogs are about to lose their castle, and if they do, the people will be……  *wait for it*…… *wait for it*…… disappointed. To prevent this tragic fate, Shinku decides to embrace his role as hero and fight in the war, which is fought as a “be a ninja”-style gameshow with obstacle courses.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I actually liked this episode. This show is just so unbelievably stupid that it might actually work. With the high stakes war, side-scroller Chocobo races, and ridiculous battles I couldn’t help but laugh. It also helps that our “hero” has no doubts or hesitation whatsoever, which is refreshing. It’s an open question whether I’ll still find this funny in a few episodes, but at the very least we shouldn’t have to worry about the show entering srs bsns mode due to how stupid it is.

This probably isn’t for everyone though: you have to have a certain “stupid” sense of humor to enjoy it, which I (unfortunately?) do.

If the rest of this show is as strong as this first episode, it’s going to be an amazing ride. I have a personal bias for shows that take place in the early years of puberty towards the beginning of middle school – it’s just such a challenging and interesting period of life and of growth. And I have a certain fondness for coming of age stories. In my experience, anime which take place in this difficult period are quite rare, but when they do, they tend to turn out amazing and rank among my favorite shows of all time. Denno Coil, Noein, Kamichu, Haibane Renmei, Narutaru, and Simoun (although delayed it’s still basically puberty) all take place during this difficult age and basically compose half of my top ten list. (well, the Narutaru anime wasn’t all that great, but the manga was. And this makes me realize, my blog’s banner has a noticeable lack of Densuke and Hoshimaru. This will be addressed.)

So why is Hourou Musuko so great? First of all, the characters. Most shows which involve crossdressing either have the characters do it against their will or be hiding their gender. Not that I have anything against these memes, mind you! Certainly, bunny suit Hayate = win, and Maria = win. But in this show we actually have some heartfelt confusion about gender and what it means, as these children’s sexual interest first develops. And these people actually care what others think of them – and people think it’s weird to crossdress. But I appreciated that even these “antagonists” – such as the sister – are unsure about it and even feel guilty at lashing out, as evidenced by her attempt at an apology. The two main characters are not the only ones who have some depth in regards to gender issues. In addition, the size of the cast is quite impressive – and it feels like we have barely touched the tip of the iceberg.

Which brings me to the second area which makes this show stand out. The script. These characters already know each other well, and know much more about each other than the viewer does. They have a long past together and relationships which are already well-developed, a comfort zone which they fit in. This is as opposed to how so many shows have characters which meet each other for the first time within the series (with the possible exception of a few childhood friends who are all the same stereotypes). Creating a believable environment where the characters have known each other for a long time is much more difficult, but in my opinion is also much more rewarding and authentic. I should point out that Hourou Musuko also has some amazing visuals. I like the fabulous shininess.

So yesterday I promised a post on Madoka, but I’ve changed my mind. I think that on a weekly basis, I will attempt to blog episodes of Fractale, Hourou Musuko, Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka, Star Driver, and Onii-chan, depending on how the second episode goes. I’m still not entirely sure where I’m heading with this blog, so I may change my mind as time progresses / miss a few episodes if I don’t have anything to say / etc. I’ll probably also do some random posts on whatever happens to strike my fancy. As for what I’m not blogging – the second episode of Dream Eater Merry bored me as much as the first, and GoSick has an interesting setting but unfortunately it doesn’t seem like they’ll be making much use of it, instead they’ll be making cute moe faces. Also the mysteries are painfully obvious. You know the only character in the room that matters is the one with strangely colored hair, plus it quite obviously shows her in the flashbacks.

This show was great. As expected of noitanimA. First of all, this show has such an imaginative setting! It reminded me a lot of some of Isaac Asimov’s stories – in particular the ones about the people on Solaris, where there are only about fifty people on the entire planet, and they live in huge mansions and never see one another. It is considered rude to even touch other people. It seems that this world isn’t quite at that level yet; people do make physical contact (as evidenced by the drug dealers and the police). I’m quite curious to learn more about the setting’s social structure.

It seems like access to the satellites which stores everyone’s data is controlled by some sort of religion which the girl that showed up is part of, and I’m interested to see where that is headed as well. In addition to having a great setting, the direction does an excellent job of exposing it as well. Instead of having the boy say “I am not used to human contact” we see him flinch away from the girl he meets; instead of saying “I’m going to upload my data to the satellite” we see him praying. This is one of the most important rules of storytelling: show, don’t tell, which animated media such as anime are able to do even better than books with facial expressions and cues which would remained unnoticed until the second or third time you watch the show. Yet show many shows fail miserably at this and have endless spoken exposition from the characters which adds nothing to the story. (“I’m going to punch you!” “This cross will… *technobabble*… make everyone Catholic!” Yes, I’m looking at you, Index. The technobabble part only took about three episodes.) So thank you Fractale for not assuming your viewers are idiots!

On the negative side… there isn’t too much to say, but I am a bit concerned about a few of the characters. In particular the main “villains” (although I highly doubt they will remain in this state for long) are giving awfully strong Team Rocket vibes. And I am a bit concerned that now we have a young girl who just hatched from data, hopefully this will not be like Dragon Crisis. But given the overall direction of the first episode, I think that the show will not fall into these traps.

I would have said that this is the best show of the new season, but unfortunately I already watched Hurou Musuko, which takes the cake by a long shot. I will probably make a post on this tomorrow, as well as on Madoka which had a great second episode. Infinite Stratos had a horrible second episode… I think I may have misevaluated the first one. I was laughing my head off for the first episode because I thought it was hilariously bad, and I only assumed something so cliched could be intentional. But in retrospect it seems like I was wrong, and the creators were actually serious.