Shameful Otaku Secret!

Witch Hunting Invocation?

Soul Eater began in earnest this week, with the real deal plot starting to kick in. And as it turns out, Shinigami-sama is kind of a dick.

This weeks new special attack: Maka Chop!

Recap

After a twisted sitcom morning featuring a guest appearance (in Soul’s bed) from Blair, Maka and Soul head to school to find that their teacher Sid is dead, Maka’s dad is filling in, and rumors abound that Sid has been turned into a zombie.

*bling*

Along with Black Star and Tsubaki, the pair are called in to see Shinigami-sama. Due to their poor performance, he gives the four students a remedial assignment: get rid of Zombie Sid. Actually, it’s more like an ultimatum. Get rid of Zombie Sid or be expelled.

It has been said, but killing a zombie created by Shibusen\'s most powerful weapon master is not an assignment that should probably be handed out to remedial students.

The fight takes up most of the episode, as this is an action show after all. Maka and Soul attempt to sync up their souls for a monster attack that bombs hard when Maka trips.

whoops

Black Star finally manages to capture Sid (and, unfortunately, Maka) in his special Trap Star maneuver.

all too effective

But not before he attacks Sid’s weak point for massive damage:

That’s... that’s his SOLAR PLEXUS!

I really hope that makes you think of this.

Anyway, someone’s pulling the strings behind Sid, and if you want to know how they got the information you’ll have to read the manga (here’s a hint: panties), but it ends up being Franken Stein, Maka’s dad’s former master before he hooked up with Maka’s mother.

A couple things

First, now that we’re into the meat and potatoes of what Soul Eater is about, the action and pacing are a little more typical for a shounen-style show. There are even broadcast announcements of attack names. It’s still far more entertaining, though, and the trick of making an attack seem indestructably awesome right before showing it fail miserably is still funny.

Oh, so we’re doing that now

The other thing is the key dissimilarity between the series and the manga: drawers. The subjects’s been covered, but this episode really drove it home because of the methods used to extract information from Sid in the manga. The Soul Eater comic is heavy on fanservice, which is why it made sense for a late-night version: the high action and wacky hijinks easily appeal to a younger audience, but why not increase the viewership with a Late Night Panty Bonus? Well, the late-night subbers I usually watch are delayed this week, so I still don’t know, but I’m doubting.

I’ll give you two guesses as to what this shot looks like in manga form. Cick the pic to find out.

It’s not a hinderance to my enjoyment of the show, not to mention I watch it with my wife who might not be that hip to Blair’s protruding nipples filling the screen all the time, but some of the bigger fans of the manga might be disappointed.

Otoha

Really? You’re really going to do this to us? I only started watching H2O in earnest because I was couch-bound with the flu and had nothing else to watch (yes, I know, Shigufumi, but hindsight is 20/20), and it hasn’t really struck me since. Like I said, I don’t hate it. I just haven’t found a great reason to get attached to it either. Takuma’s a decent protagonist but kind of flat, and the two main girls aren’t exactly brimming with personality either. But now, just when I start to think I can handle sticking with this show until the end, they whip out a bizarrely random but mostly unfunny self-parody episode. Why kill what little flow you had up until now?

Something is wrong.

Story

Well, there isn’t much of one here. Takuma wakes up one morning to find that Hotaru and Hayami are his sisters, and his uncle is his “mother” aka a cross-dressing vehicle for typically Japanese homophobia.

Very wrong.

I mean this within the context of the show, but also on multiple other levels.

School turns out to be no better, with Otoha appearing as a both a transfer student from the spirit world and his fiancee; and Yui as “Magical Farm Girl Yui,” who plans to turn the school into a farm. Otoha herself transforms into a magical girl and we get some half-baked Sailor Moon parody action for a while. The halfway point has a new, fake OP, and I must admit I had a chuckle. Other parodies (some I caught and some I didn’t) wind their way through this wholly random and spastic excuse for sweat beads and fanservice as Takuma is forced to whack people with the nearest object until he can make sense of the world again (Best line, as he smacks Hamaji: “When you came out of the closet it was shocking, but it moved my heart a little!”).

Nope. Still wrong.

In the end, the entire debacle was actually last week’s storybook brought to life by Otoha, which I don’t consider a spoiler because it’s barely important. There is one other major development that takes place in the final minutes as reality comes back together, and it’s kind of sad but I have very little emotional attachment to this show to begin with.

What We’ve Learned

Not much: this whole thing seems conceived as some kind of break or respite from regular progress, or at least an explosion of fanservice.

Thankfully, all television anime scriptwriters aren’t this predictable.

However, we see a major character supposedly bowing out for good, so our one development is a biggie. What’s this going to do for the plot? I’m guessing Takuma’s time with eyesight is going to be running out soon, but I don’t know what else.

We also learned that someone both wrote and recorded a “Magical Girl Otoha” theme for this episode. I have pity, I do. But like I said, it was my one real laugh.

And most importantly, we learned that the beach episode wasn’t the worst this show could do.

Thoughts

Like a trip to visit dying Uncle Bobo in the clown hospital, a bittersweet end to a random-ass experience.

There hasn’t been a major push in any particular direction, so I really don’t understand what’s supposed to be developing or what’s supposed to be driving me to watch the show anymore. That mysterious carrot on a stick is farther away and smaller looking than ever. And for a show with such thin developments to suddenly drop in a sidestep like this when every other series is making great strides, I hope they have something in mind.

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

see what I did there?

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.