Shameful Otaku Secret!

About Looooooove

I officially stopped blogging Code Geass R2, but this is a blog and why should anything be official? I called it a train wreck and revolts were led against me, but let me make myself clear: the more railroad cars pile up on this bitch, the more I love it.

And this week, Geass returned the love. “Love Attack,” that is! From Milly’s usual overblown heiress-antics to that old Sousuke Sagara chestnut, “mecha used in inappropriate situation,” Geass brings the lulz.

Quick points:

Zero does photo ops now? My, how the mighty have fallen. Note that neither Zero nor Xing Ke’s wives can see over the podiums.

If Sayako doesn’t watch the amount of dates Lulu goes on, he’ll be traveling to the aquarium via the 12 o’clock Nice Boat.

The 6 Million Dollar Orange has the mother of all Geasses. When “Ask A Ninja” reviewed Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (and later again for 3), the Ninja’s big problem was that “everyone is a pirate now.” It’s the same with R2. Everyone has a Geass. But now, someone has an awesome Geass.

Shin is right. Shirley is toast. Sorry, everyone, she’s cute, but that scene at the bottom of the stairs did look like a flag. I could be wrong of course — any perceived foreshadowing could be a red herring, considering that they make this shit up as they go.

But you have to admit, it’d be a good plot point. It’s been a while since LeDouche really had to grasp the human cost of what he does, and heywaitaminute did everyone just forget about Kallen?

Must be nice to be rich. What’s your name? Eh? You’re hired!

You’re a knight of rounds? Hey! Hey! Lulu! Take me to do the illegal stuff! I won’t be a dork, I promise! Geno will be played by Anthony Michael Hall, circa 1985, in the Hollywood remake of Geass.

I think this is the first time Anya has ever looked worried. Apparently, Ashford High is populated by anime bloggers lolicons. No wonder she went for the Unfair Mech Advantage and saddled up Mordred.

Sayako may have gotten LeDouche’s athletic ability wrong, but she got this part right. I laughed. A lot.

This made me think of something. I may have mentioned that the Geass dub (currently airing in the US on Adult Swim on Saturdays) is pure shit. I see no reason why I shouldn’t own the DVDs (other than it comes out at the same time as Gurren Fucking Lagann) but I need to figure out how to wire their audio tracks permanently to the “not shit” channel.

Save for Crispin Freeman as Orange-kun, all the voice actors are positively vomitous. And Johnny Young Bosh, while he’s ok (I actually did like his dub of Itsuki in Haruhi) is just not right. This scene cemented that.

There is no way that one of these mostly-second-rate American dub actors can match Jun Fukuyama’s delivery, which can only be described as Fruity Menace. Or is it Villainously Poncy? I dunno.

Lulucopter.

If only it had a maid guy…

I really didn’t care too much for this series at episode one, but after sticking it out through the somewhat unfortunate “little girl punching bag” arc, it’s starting to reward me with some great laughs. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you it’s the best thing out there, but you could do worse than to hang out with five people, two animals, and a robot.

1. OP/ED

With an opener so spastically animated, you could watch once a week all season and still not figure out what’s going on. And the EDs rotate every week. Apparently they’re even different per channel, so if you switched around in theory you could keep watching the same one, but why would you do that? Each one has a cast member singing, each fitting the character’s personality. As expected for those of you who do watch, Ginka’s has been the best so far. Which brings me to…

2. Ginka

I am so wary of gay characters in anime; Japan seems to have an issue with homophobia that eclipses their xenophobia even. So when I saw Ginka at the end of episode one, I sighed internally. But as it turns out, he’s become a great example of how humor springs from turning a stereotype on its head. Not a gay stereotype mind you, an anime stereotype. Ginka is so casually manly and heroic — seemingly fearless in fact —  and he’s got a very well-developed spider-sense. Simultaneously, he loses sleep about his pores.

3. Neko-san

I don’t mean catgirl Kyouka herself, she’s still a somewhat annoying character. But she’s been minimized a little by the huge cast and crazy situations. What I mean is, Chika calls her Neko-san, and I think it’s freaking hilarious for some reason.

4. Food

Every time food figures into the show, it’s been cooked by Kyouka, and while horrible food is an anime staple, I’ve never seen it actually cry out for the merciful release of death before.

5. Sheer Randomness.

is that a word? An entire plot revolves around a travel agent so good at her job that her sales chart wraps around the ceiling, and her rival curses her using voodoo learned from a correspondence course. As Ouka walks through his living room, Yuuka’s rolling around on Teika the Lion’s back praising how soft and comfy he is. When Kyouka jumps from desk to desk at the travel agent, there’s a retarded operatic sound effect. Low-budget virtual reality. Or cut to the travel agent chief: “Sparkle!” And that’s only this week. The whole thing goes at ninety miles a minute, and since there’s rarely any rhyme or reason there’s no need to try to anticipate what’s next.

Sooo… anyway, it’ll never be deep, and it’s pretty dumb when it tries to get serious, but Kyouran Kazoku Nikki is a welcome blast of pure spastic fun.

Guilty Pleasure without all that bothersome pleasure.

Let me preface this whole thing by saying that Girl’s High is a dumb series and I didn’t care one iota when it ended. It’s dreck, for the most part, and if they bring it back for a second series I’m not sure I’ll care enough to watch. So, if you don’t want to hear me talk about how much it sucked, stop now.

Story & Characters

Girl’s High is kind of what it sounds like — it’s a slice of life “comedy” about six girls in high school. The supposed appeal of the premise is that the show subverts your given notions about sweet young girls, the kind perpetuated by this very medium much of the time. And that, to me, is great. Fighting, scheming, menstruation talk, inappropriate places to leave pubic hairs, and more than a couple f-bombs make for an atypical experience. But it’s all a pretty transparent picture painted on a terribly empty canvas. The problem is, rather than go with the time-honored practice of short-cutting characters by giving them usual anime archetypes, the writers elected to leave personalities out of the equation altogether. Who are these girls again? There’s the regular one, the short one, the other regular one, and one has glasses. Wait. No, that was the regular one.

On second thought, the problem is that the humor just isn’t raunchy enough most of the time. I don’t know if it’s cultural, if something’s lost in translation, or if most people don’t hang out with the kind of females I know, but this shit was tame as baby kitties most of the time (I’ll reiterate most of the time because it has its moments, like the wrong-as-hell final episode, but that was just too little too late).

No, think again, maybe the problem is that just when they’re onto something funny, the writers think they have to drop a serious drama-bomb on the series and prove that they couldn’t write their way out of a bento box. The biggest problem with the “serious” stuff is that the girls get themselves into difficult situations because they’re apparently too stupid to see around blatant attempts to get raped or manipulated. Better writers could have easily made these situations possible and thus watchable, but these writers know tit jokes and not much else.

There are at least three episodes where something made me laugh out loud, and those were all well-written payoffs to fairly long jokes (the singing of the school anthem at Kouda’s “death party” is really one of the moments the show exists for). But they’re too far between.

Animation

Wow. I mean, I know comedic anime neither gets nor requires big budgets like robot or sword shows, but seriously. These producers whipped out every cheap trick in the book (bouncing a waist-up still picture up and down to illustrate walking, that sort of thing) and still can’t manage to get smooth movement or worse, consistent character design.

I’ve been trying to raise the fan service issues in most reviews, but it’s really a special case here. I can’t figure out if this show is actually for girls or boys. It seems like it should be girl-focused, and in the really lame world of anime aimed at girls, it should be a step in the right direction. But Jesus fuck, there are just so many panty shots I can’t quite keep my mind around that theory. Yes, they use their feminine wiles to get ahead with teachers and boys, who are all portrayed as complete tools, but still… I think the only time that any care went into the drawing was when panties were on screen.

Credits & Music

The opening music is inoffensive, the opening animation is boring. The closing animation is one of the best parts, and not just because you know you’re closer to the series being over: a very sweet J-pop tune bounces along behind individual animations of all the girls doing little dances. It’s actually really cute and seems somehow more “real” than the show itself. For me, it’s suddenly become one of anime’s great mysteries how this great closer ended up on this mostly-lousy show.

Incidental music is of the worst kind: you know those shows where they seem to have one little tune to fit any particular mood? InuYasha comes to mind. There’s the action theme, the comic relief theme, the traveling music, and the foreboding ominous whatever. It’s like that, except every type of music is goofy. Rumbling tuba sounds, honks, and even fart noises permeate nearly every intolerable second of the irritating soundtrack. To top it off, the voice actors lack personality to the point where I can’t always tell who’s talking. There’s no dub in existence, and thank God for that: the voice actor unfortunate enough to be the second person to utter any of these lines is a sucker.

Bottom Line

I don’t know what more I need to sum up. If you’re really itching to see this show, go for it, but if other reviews have made it sound entertainingly raunchy and shockingly crass, it’s not. It’s lame, tepid humor loaded down with bad slapstick and bodily function stuff. And while I can appreciate that when it’s done well, it’s just not. You want a genuinely funny high school anime show? Try the deservingly-hyped Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya instead.