見ないで！恥ずかしい…

Angel Tail features quite possibly the least threatening harem that I’ve ever seen. Goro Mutsumi’s harem consists of his pets which have been reincarnated as guardian angels. And they’re not pets like that. They’re very much still hamsters or parakeets or puppies, just in human form. Therefore, there really isn’t any romantic feelings of any kind going on and never in any way, at any point, made it seem like Goro was going to “end up” with one of them. There’s one episode, for example where the angels meet a woman/bird who was also reincarnated way back in the day. She’s lived with her “master” for decades now, but they aren’t married or anything.

It’s sort of weird trying to write about this show because it feels like anime keeps trying to make everything sexualized so they can then sell that sex. I’ll write something like “master” and then I’ll feel like I’ll immediately need to clarify that it’s “master” as in the person that feeds a pet and provides a roof over its head. The first thing that anime makes me want to think there is like some maid or something who will do anything (yes, especially that) for her master. Stupid trying to sell body pillows and nudie figures making good (ok, actually not that good) clean fun seem weird.

It’s also kind of weird because there will these darker scenes that feel totally incongruous with that nonthreatening, good clean fun that the other 99% of this series is. There are a bunch of scenes where the angels remember how they died, which aren’t really watered down. Akane the fox, for example is scared of dogs because she was chased into a corner by a pack of hunting dogs and then shot and killed by their masters. Tsubasa the parakeet is afraid of heights because she had broken her wing, and after Goro helped to set it, she tried to fly but was still too weak and fell and broke her neck. Or there’s a scene where two of the loli angels are teased by a shota who abuses animals until they realize that since they’re no longer tiny (a frog and a puppy) that they can actually fight back now that they’re his size and beat the crap out of him.

this show actually does have a pretty good cast, along with a loli aya hirano in what i think might be her first anime role as the monkey loli

Would I watch it even if I weren’t forced? It’s so dull that I when I went to put this on my iPod, I was told, “Wow, I can’t believe I actually saved this.”

when you’ve got the demonic charm of ono, it’s not hard to accumulate a manharem

I dunno what Aroduc is talking about. Antique Bakery was pretty awesome, even though I was watching it completely ironically. Basically, I mentally remembered scenes like the ones in Ouran where something banal would happen, but it would cut to fangirls squeeing to remind us that this is actually supposed to imply buttsecks.

But at the same time, this show really reminds me of the Onion AV Club post today on Wild Things, and primarily the opening where they point out that you can get too mired in irony and not realize that something that’s so-bad-it’s-good is actually so-good-it’s-good because it is trying to be exactly what it is. They don’t mention Susan Sontag’s famous definition of camp, which is “failed seriousness”. Antique Bakery to me never was trying really to be serious and therefore couldn’t fail at seriousness. It’s quite goofy at times, yes, but not in a way where it’s putting huge ironic quotes around everything. Ono is a gay of demonic charm. He’s not a “gay” of “demonic charm”.

Also, the show has a pretty visually creative opening. I can’t seem to remember off of the top of my head, but is that a pretty common Noitamina thing or am I just over-reaching with how awesome Honey and Clover’s was?

So remember how I said that Heroes was the top-selling TV series DVD release last year and also got about 13 million viewers? It also gets about 10 million viewers on Bittorrent. Most of this article at TorrentFreak is the usually blah blah torrents are awesome and here are actual numbers and support for our findings sort of thing from them, but what really struck me was this part:

As an example he mentioned last year’s promotional tour in France, where the actors were recognized by hundreds of fans, even though the show had not even premiered on TV yet.

Alexander has hit the nail on the head. This is in fact one of the main reasons why shows like ‘Heroes’ are so popular on filesharing networks. It can take up to six months after the US premiere before these shows are aired in Europe, Australia and other parts of the world. Jesse agreed that this is indeed one of the major causes of piracy. “This gap is something that is certainly going to change in the future,” he added.

But but but I thought that people that didn’t want to wait 2 years for a show were “entitled” “internet wussies” who demand “instant gratification”, not that there was an inefficient mode of distribution that undercut sales!

full size

Oops, that’s not it. I mean:
Continue reading ’summer 2008: strike witches 1 aka OH NO HE DIDN’T’

What is by far the most-watched TV show in America? American Idol. How much money do people spend on American Idol? Um, yeah…

CD sales for the winners have been dropping from the season 2 high, even though season 2 was the 2nd least watched season of the show. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even find DVD sales numbers. And do you know why? They don’t actually release season DVDs, just random “best of” scene compilations. While the show makes assloads of money from advertising and product placements, it seems safe to assume that from the audience’s perspective, the show is basically disposable. Even if 37 million people watch it. For something this commercial, I’d be amazed if there was actually a market for season DVDs of this show yet Fox wasn’t producing them.

Wikipedia says that Jordin Sparks sold 965,000 copies of her CD. Wikipedia also says that 37 million people watched the show that season. This comes out to 2.6% of the people that watched the show bought her album. (Heroes, the top-selling show sold 1.8 million copies of its DVD out of about 13 million viewers, for about 13.6%). At the same time, however it’s not like the audience numbers for American Idol have been plummeting. They rose to a point and have basically stayed constant.

Is this a fair comparison for anime? If we’re talking about income models, of course not. One is ad-supported broadcast TV, while the other is imported DVDs. But if we’re talking about “specialness”, why not? Both are basically gussied-up commercials for tie-in goods. Why can’t I think that anime is just as disposable as American TV?

Did you ever watch Ikkitousen and go “Man, this show is pretty awesome, but I wish that they replaced every reference to Romance of the Three Kingdoms with some huge tits?” No? Well then you probably watched Sumomo mo Momo mo and thought “Man, this show is pretty awesome, but I wish that they replaced the comedic timing with some huge tits?” Not that either? Alright, then SURELY you watched Pokemon and thought “Man, this show is pretty awesome, but I wish that Mudkip (which I hear you like, btw) had huge tits and instead of saying ‘I choose you, Mudkip!’ Ash had to make out with her/it and that makes her/it orgasm?”

(I so bet there’s a picture of that on /b/)

So I’m the only one then? Guess I’m a weirdo. Aaaaanyway, while watching this show, I decided to yell out “YEAH! FUCKIN’ ANIME TITS!” every time there was a shot like these which heavily emphasized someone’s huge anime boobs:

Continue reading ’summer 2008: suckirei’

So with the news that Bandai Entertainment will take over Bandai Visual USA’s Honneamise line, combined with one of the dudes at PiQ mentioning the idea, I started thinking about what exactly a Criterion Collection-style anime release would look like. Man, I love me some Criterion Collection DVDs. I bought a few and borrowed as many as I could from the school libraries.

now that’s a dvd release. and some great box art.

If you thought that this was going to be about fansubs or ADV or whatever, you lose! Rather, this is about weeaboo dining and the crazy food costs that have been going on in the last year.

We ate at Yakiniku West today. We looked at the menu and saw how the sets were a few dollars more expensive than the last time we were there (and those prices in turn were a few dollars more expensive than when we first went there about a year or so ago), so we decided to just order a bunch of stuff ala carte. The meat portions that we got this time were much smaller than usual, with the chicken one having exactly four slices of meat for about $6.75. This made my plate of Kobe short rib look like a deal at around $13.25 since even though it was twice the price, there was probably about three times the amount of (better-quality) meat. In the end, our bill for a plate of chicken, a plate of pork, a plate of Kobe short ribs, a plate of vegetables, a salad, a miso soup, a bibimbap, a zaru soba, and a bowl of black sesame ice cream (which came complete with two black sesame Pocky sticks!) came to $60. Ooph. Normally, we end up paying $60 or so for both the meal and a 20% tip.

So yeah, blame speculators or increased living standards in China and India or the Fed’s devaluation of the dollar or whatever you choose. In the end, it looks like we’ll just have to pay a lot more for our weeaboo pleasures.

(Also, there was a large party behind us that made us laugh so hard because all of their conversations were like a non-satirical version of Stuff White People Like. I think I heard them mention such white favorites as Japan, diversity, renovations, the idea of soccer, gentrification, being the only white person around, kitchen gadgets, and Manhattan.)

Man, waiting until other people have written very thorough previews is the way to go. I still get to get my completely unfounded ridicule on, yet I can at least know what shows are about and who is starring in them! Because let’s face it: the whole point of these kinds of posts is just to make jokes about things we don’t know about and then to look back on them and be like “‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: Is this a Kimi ga Nozomu Eien spinoff?’ LOLOLOL BOY IS MY FACE RED!”

because the only thing better than lolis named after ww2 aces that turn into ww2 fighter planes is um, uh, well if you excluded the loli part…

also, lol “autumn 2006″

in case you couldn’t tell from the occasional fart joke, this is a broccoli title

I’m amazed that Galaxy Angel goes on for as long as it does. Out of one game, there’s 6 anime plus other spinoffs like manga and a musical, which I kindasorta wish I could see somehow. In the first season anyway, there’s really not much that goes on. Each episode is completely self-contained to the point where there was one episode where they were investigating a space station that was contaminated with a virus that turns everyone into monkeys. Everyone catches it and turns into a monkey. Then the next episode, everything is back to normal.

That’s not really a shortcoming of the show since the whole point is that it’s a bite-size comedy full of ker-razy antics. They sound like satire but aren’t totally so, but tj han’s post about this show is pretty dead-on: the only real selling point for this show is the cast. Do you want to hear Miyuki Sawashiro being regal, Yukari Tamura being goofy, and Mika Kanai being deadpan? Then sit down and buckle up!

Although you don’t need to remain buckled for very long. Each episode is only 10 minutes long, which adds to the disposable feel of the show. And is probably contributing to the disposable of this post.

Would I watch it even if I weren’t forced? Eh, I dunno. I did enjoy the seiyuu performances, but this show really isn’t anything else going for it. I didn’t even find it very funny.