I’m a bit late getting this post up. Over the weekend I managed to catch coldzilla, and had to entertain siblings while they crashed here for a couple days which happens once or twice a month. So I didn’t have much time to get on here… well I did yesterday but despite the cold backing off in the goo and coughing departments just being alive made my head hurt. -_-; Anyway on to things people actually care about.
Today the apples finally come into play. I mean from the ED theme song of course… Now this marks a first for this show, Horo isn’t nekkid at all during the whole episode. She eats apples, acts moe, slaps Lawrence, learns about money… gets hit on by Lawrence’s friend and massively rips off a merchant. Which is balanced out I suppose by Lawrence getting only slightly ripped off by his acquaintance from an episode back. Again Spice and Wolf does play pretty realistically with the 3-D world… since there was a point in time when places had a bajillion forms of currency of their own in addition to stuff from other places. Used to be every bank had it’s own… So yeah… Lawrence is intentionally mean to Horo when he notices her interest in the apples… he makes her ask for them… and he waited because it amused him to have something someone else wanted… Which sounds all kinds of strange when I word it like that. She gets him back though by not letting him have any of them. Good job Horo.
Later on we meet one of Lawrence’s friends who’s a money changer. Give him x these and get y other things, simple job that disappeared when banks got greedier. Before that you could make a living breaking 20’s for people… a little exaggerated but that’s the gist of it. So anyway yeah… he hits on Horo Lawrence gets upset Horo is amused. But lo and behold the silver in those coins is going down not up… so their information was wtrong and Lawrence realizes he got grifted by some kid using a con he already knew. Which just makes it worse I suppose… so now they’re off to see the merchant Horo ripped off with her super strong martin pelts that smell like fruit’ and they only smelled like fruit because of the apples she’d bought a little while before selling the pelts… she also ate all the apples in that time frame and there were a *lot* of apples… So… the episode ends… and leaves us waiting for the next episode and then the long awaited February Third when the OP-ED Single is supposed to come out.
Also known as: “Sai”shuu Heiki “Kano”jo which is something along the line of my girlfriend the ultimate weapon… But then don’t trust me the only moonspeak I know I’ve picked up from watching anime…. well what little I didn’t pick up from video games. I’ve only seen the first seven episodes so far but… wow… the music in parts is good… the art… well the only thing I ever care for is weapon mode Chise… although Akemi is kind of cute, reminds me of Tatsuki from Bleach… less violent though. The rest of the show… well if you’ve seen the tag description you’ll know I refer to it as ‘angst + mecha musume’… that about sums it up. You have two people (Chise and Shuuji) trying to hold together a relationship and at the same time Chise’s busy turning into something with mechanical wings and a gun for a hand, at least for a while she hasn’t done the gun thing recently… suffice it to say she’s powerful enough she can’t help leveling a city most of the time… which defeats the purpose of using her to defend some place really… especially if she’s ina n earthquake and her system mistakes it for an enemy attack and blows half the school building away… and that’s her trying to hold back… It just seems nothing good ever happens it’s sad about this angst this other thing depressed something else. -_-; Enough to make a guy get depressed his own self just watching it… or at least sends the mind back to yesteryear. But the art I don’t like the art… again aside from mecha-Chise… and Chise in general… and Akemi… and Akemi’s imouto… I notice a trend there somewhere. No really it’s just Shuuji… he’s got this huge neck and very little chin to speak of… whereas everyone else is drawn normal looking. Sure the styles a little… thicker than is normal (You’ll see what I mean when you start watching) but Shuuji’s just funny looking… his nose is odd his shoulders are *huge* in proportion to the rest of him and then there’s the whole chin and neck thing… his parents must have been rednecks…
Plus I want to punch the guy… or I would but you know no way to get from my server to his… I suppose I could go for an entanglement but really why risk wet damage? There’s one scene where Akemi slaps him and he slaps her right back. Wanted to maul the /b/tard -_-’ I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it but still when she slapped him it wasn’t serious it was just one of those ‘you jerk you had me worried’ things… and he slapped her back pretty hard… hard enough she wore a bandage over it for a couple days… but that was probably just to cover the bruise… Crazy show and I’m only half done it… think I’ll get the lights and noose ready for episode thirteen. ZETSUBOU SHITA! This angsty show has sent me into despair!!!!1 Or something like that. ;p Seriously though I’m going to need a heavy dose of Shugo Chara after this… or something else as fluffy sweet as that show gets… Some spicy wolf might fix it too… mmm Ookamimimi :Q
It’s not often I actually read a news article… but I did today for some odd reason. It was pretty boring and I skimmed through it at best but I did notice a link at the bottom of the page. It had to do with the whole whaling expedition the eleven’s sent out a while back. Apparently, a group environmental activists decided to board one of the ships. (For all I know there is only one ship.) I’m not sure what took place but I can imagine what a sailor would do to people boarding illegally… now if that sailor were also an eleven? I expect some faces got broken… Anyway, the news over in Area Eleven has gone so far as to call these activists ‘terrorists’. Which is technically correct. I doubt they were boarding to try to scare people into seeign things there way but they did board a ship from another country, without permission none the less… The article says Japan tends to see this as an issue of sovereignty.. int hat nobody gets to tell them what they can and can’t eat. It also makes a good reference to North America’s penchant for eating lambs. Face it people, they got us there, even I a very non gourmet have eaten baby sheep once or twice. (I didn’t much care for it but I ate it anyway.) All I have to say is way to go them… there’s absolutely nothing wrong with eating whales we eat everything else. People in Africa eat monkeys… other places in japan eat whales…dolphins on occasion… and we over here eat baby sheep. Oh I forgot about the places that eat dogs and cats. The only thing most people seem to agree on is not eating each other… Out of all of those who’s eating the cutest one? Us… and is Japan busy ranting and raving and raiding our sheep farms? No… so leave them alone, it’s not like they’re doing it like back in the day where you kill as many as you can. They’ve got a set limit they intend to reach. Sure that limit is 1000 but consider how many people live over there… Don’t worry I’ll have relevant (ie anime related) stuff later… But I just couldn’t leave my ‘totally random’ categorie with nothing in it. ;p And this is exactly the kind of thing it’s for.
Rosario + Vampire Episode three was… well as I mentioned last time I was expecting a loli in the next three episodes, and apparently I got one. Not only is this a magic loli with an awesome hat… it’s apparently of the bisexual type. We first meet Yukari while she’s busy stalking… Moka… yes that’s right.The little witch causes some trouble with a group of very unpleasant looking people,one of which is apparently her class rep. Moka dives in headfirst to save the kid, who’s about four years younger than everybody else due to her being as smart as she is. Yukari is pleased, very pleased… and while in the cafeteria proceeds to jump over the table and take Moka to a grope fest… and Tsukune just watches.
Yukari is apparently reluctant to stop groping Moka as we see her dragging the loli witch around and.. well yeah. Tsukune gets a bit beat up when he tries to complain about the mass amounts of yuri taking place, he’s allowed a) he’s human b) she attacked him with sentient mops, brooms and whatever else happened to be int he storage closet… So he takes a trip to the infirmary and guess who apparently works there… that’s right Kurumu the blue haired succubus. As if that wasn’t already a problem waiting to happen Yukari’s camped outside the window with a voodoo doll.Which effectivley leads to another nosebleed and a showdown with a trio of lizardmen bent on having some witch for dinner.
In Gunslinger girl Il Teatrino’s episode two stuff happens. Who’d have thought stuff would happen… but today isn’t about the people of the child welfare association. It’s about a guy named Pinocchio… who’s also int he buisness of blastingthings eventhough he’s only nine or so when the episode starts. Some old guy sends him to carry out a hit on some other guy. Pinnocchio intended to give him a couple silenced rounds but the guy ws waiting for him and he had to introduce him to mister knifey. Turns out that this guy had a daughter and she saw Pinocchio do it so he points his knife at her… and then decides to fill the loli so full of lead he could use her as a pencil later.
That was just a flashback though as the next time we see Pinocchio he’s a lot older. The episode pretty much shows us what the opposition is doing, Pinocchio just happens to be a terrorist. So far the hsows overall storyline is slow to set in but that’s nto always a bad thing… it’s just that season one did it a lot quicker. Anyway apparently Pinocchio has a fan of the loli variety named Aurora… she has her mother cook food for him and in general, follows him around. Apparently he’s not amused becasue he tells her to stop, but that could be the fact that he’s got two freelance terrorists crashing at his place for the next couple days… or it could be she reminds him of the other little girl he shot four or five times… The storyline points out that a Mercedes (the car) must be female because it’s a girls name… which should have been obvious since all cars are female. anyway, the episode does end with some of our gunslinger girls. Apparently angelica is recovering from her massive memory issues. (If you haven’t seen season one Angelica’s been conditioned a little too much and at one point you could walk in and talk to her for five minutes and all of a sudden she’s going ‘oh when did you get here?’ She’s also the first one of… whatever they’re called. We don’t see Henrietta but we do see Rico looking far too amused by a rocket launcher and Triela has a scene that’s a flashback to yesterday but she also has one where she’s standing in the parking lot looking nervous and all kinds of moe. In case you can’t tell Triela’s my favourite.
Episode two starts off crazier than the first one. While this one is still set int he class room it’s spoken entirely in gibberish for the first five or so minutes. Some guy who apparently looks like an ‘Admiral Perry’ or at least that’s what Kafuka says, but when is she accurate about anything? So he storms through the school opening things. Lockers… doors, Komori’s hair… among other things. He then goes to the pool and we’re forced to see this guy in a speedo. Not amusing… what was amusing is someone other than Itoshiki-sensei did the whole black and white look left face right thing he always does before yelling ZETSUBOU SHITA! Of course it had little to do with anything.
Second storyline consisted of Itoshiki-sensei being on the verge of celebrating some holiday according to the old calendar. Which of course gets carried off on a tangent about old this old that, the part of the episode even takes place int he old school building which is now a beach… Where they’re visited by one of his old friends… and they begin a quest to get his old friend an old name. Throughout the episode random things happen. A soldier will crawl across the background on his elbows… you know like they always go under the barbed wire thing in those military training camps on tv… Or a tank speeds through the area, for no real reason at all. He only tried to hang himself once this entire episode… either the show is slipping or they got tired of that joke. Seems i forgot to bring up the other mini story about over embellishment. They go into a little escapade where Kafuka awards trophies for ‘master of chic’ whatever that means. Really she gives them to people who go way over board on things. Doggie sweaters… which are stupid in my opinion, taken to the extreme the dogs wearing more clothes than most people… stuff like that. I only recalled it earlier this morning as the other two were far more impressionable. n_n;
I had no idea what to expect when I picked this episode up. I’d only played maybe thirty seconds of any of the Persona games… (I had ROMS and they were fubar…)
So we start off with a redheaded girl in some water… who then points at the sun… Okay whatever then theopera starts playing and I’m really thinking this show’s either going to suck or be really really strange. We then see some boats and a wierd mecha lifting thing that picked up a sub… that’s empty. It’s not supposed to be and recently someone was in it but they’re gone now. No idea what the significance of the sub is though. Maybe just to introduce us to Ryou, the chief of some form of police station. They talk about a ‘Reversal’ that happened a while back and s apparently, people getting turned inside out. Always high school students apparently, and always people off a specific list. Somewhere in there we meet two other people. Jun and Shin, they’re Ryou’s siblings though we don’t know that until a little while later. So they have this mostly meaningless little escapade around town because they were moving in with their brother. But the door’s locked and there’s a security thing they’d need to disarm… Ryou, in the meantime, visits a morgue, sees an inside out person, pops some pills and goes to a crime scene where there was another inside out person. Which leaves only one person on the list… so he runs over there while Jun and Shin have some dinner and Shin doodles on the suggestion card…
Then we see some thuggish looking guy straddling some chick and mentioning how he’ll be gentle… You expect him to whip something out, and he does… except that it’s a giant robot looking thing… Which tries to eat some female looking ghost thing it pulls out of the girl… Ryou show’s up and points at him for a while… and shoots laser beams… Or his ghosty robot thing does. Struggle ensues and they jump off the side of the building and he gets thug guys ghost mech thing in the shoulder. Which makes the other guy freak out and start holding his head. Putting two and two together with what happens we figure out he’s been eating peoples ghost mechs and somehow that makes them turn inside out. I have no idea what the hells going on okay… So all well and good Ryou goes home and wakes Jun and Shin up and, oh did I mention Jun had a twin sister who’s name I forget she’s not around any more but well it screwed Jun up enough that he hold conversations with her… except he does all the talking… He also has one of her dresses but it’s too small for him, fromt he look of it, so there’s not going to be any Black Lagoon type things going on… Although Jun and his sister do bear a bit of resemblance to those two…
Anyway Shun decides to go outside to track down something he saw in a dream and he runs across thug guy freaking out in a building, with a container full of the same pills Ryou was seen taking earlier. So the thug guys ghost thing is freaking out and tries to do whatever it was doing to that girl earlier… to Shun. Who is saved by a sword that pops out of his stomach… apparently he has one of these ghosty things, which my research now tells me are actually called Persona… his is actually pretty cool looking. Still very mecha like but this one has a sword, I like swords. So it cuts the other guys in half and he stops freaking out and sounds very annoyed that the things gone. I really have no idea…. the episode ended there. The OP was okay… and the ED had some weird artwork but I don’t recall if the tune was any good. Through the show there was some background music I liked, particularly the song as Ryou goes driving off to rescue the chick on the list just before the eyecatch… It was nice kind of heavy metal but it kind of didn’t fit the fact that all that was happening was driving… Now if that had been the fight tune when the sword Persona took out the thug dudes then heck yeah. Still a good song though.
I’ve read some things over on MAL and someone compared this to Ergo Proxy… only diff being the fact that in Ergo Proxy Vincent (the main male character) actually transformed into Ergo Proxy… In Persona they don’t really transform. It’s a decent show so far, dark, violent… giant robot like things… There’s another episode out but I don’t have it yet.
Well, just got through the second episode of this and I think I’m going to like it. So far there’s been no real conflict or violence aside from a flashback that involved some wolves attacking Lawrence and his buddies from back in the day. I still like the ED theme in all it’s engrish glory as well.
Lawrence and Horo encounter a rainstorm, Horo catches fleas, they lie to a priest… Pretend to be married… make a potential business opportunity in a vineyard owner and run into some other merchant who sports the same style beard as Lawrence. Oh right, Horo makes a suggestion about his beard as well. She also talks awesome. In case you can’t tell Horo talks old school japanese. If it were english she’d be talking like a King James bible… Her moe factor really comes out in this episode. Episode one she was nekkid 90% of the time… but now she’s moe. Choking on potatoes… treating Lawrence like a kid. Comments about wolves eating peoples heads to absorb their knowledge… She even goes so far as to imply that she’s eaten people a few times as well… and not in a good way. I sense a potential love triangle on the way since… whatever her name was from episode one obviously likes Lawrence and he keeps showing signs of liking Horo… and well the fact that the other girls not so little anymore not lost on him. the only hard to imagine part at the moment is Horo falling in love with Lawrence. There’s the obvious age gap… she’s a few hundred years old after all… but yes she’s moe… especially while she explains that she and potatoes have never gotten along. Oh… she’s a lie detector too…. seriously she can differentiate between lies and the truth fairly accurately. I assume it has to do with a wolf’s sense of hearing and smell.
The only thing I don’t really like is the monsterization of wolves. I know it fits to the time periods views but still they’ve got them on there as these outright savage things that are intent on chasing you down and eating you… Even goes so far as to have a pack of them do so in Lawrence’s flashback. Now it’s true that sometimes wolves did attack people, but rarely in packs and usually when they were starved… or rabid. No ‘eating’ jokes? I surprise even myself sometimes.
Well I’m sure I mentioned previously that I liked the OP. Really it is cute, and I probably only like it for the engrish. Up until last night this was another of the ‘been building up a collection but never actually watched’ shows I have… But as I mentioned before I have an issue of the manga. So right away I noticed things happening wrong, or in most cases in the wrong order. Nothing big though, things like… Amu getting the Humpty Lock before she’s supposed to, doing a chara change early… running into her first X egg on her own when in fact… the Jack chair guy is supposed to take her out looking for them. Little insignificant things really, the story line’s unaffected. Now I wouldn’t have pegged this as mahou shoujo because Volume one ends just before she does her fist character transformation to beat an X egg, which they found running around on it’s own and nowhere near that 3rd grader kid. It happens much much faster in the anime, and comes complete with ‘nekkid’ transformation sequence. It did succeed in something that nothing since… Nanoha has done, by making me feel creepy. You think “She’s cute.” Then the fact that she’s in the fifth grade sets in…
Someone once asked if anyone who watches this show watches it for something other than the goth loli. Which makes me keep looking for it but all you ever get is Amu’s little sister… There’s punk… which keeps getting labeled as goth punk which isn’t fashion but a music style. Sure she wears a lot of black and red but that doesn’t make her goth any more than it makes the rest of the girls in her school who wear the black blazer and the red plaid skirt uniform. And they discriminate fairly. Girls have to wear skirts… boys have to wear shorts. Only teachers get to wear pants… Oops I lied, seems at least in artwork she’s worn something you could qualify as goth loli. she doesn’t seem to wear any of this in the anime… nto yet anyway she’s still got forty or so episodes I guess.
Seriously though, I’ve got a red t-shirt and black jeans… am I goth too? I don’t think so Tim.
Remember back in the day… you bought a disc of say… Chobits… yeah I know the manga was better… don’t take me off topic you. When you opened it tucked into the inside of the left side was a piece of paper with information about each episode on it. But in fact it was a big piece of paper folded in half and it had a picture of Chi in some crazy outfit… Yeah you remember those things, think they were called pinups or posters or something. Or maybe you bought a copy of aBe’s Niea Under7 and were happy to find some create a scene kits… kind of like paper dolls but it’s a character or two and a background instead of one character and a bunch of clothes… (You probably should jsut ignore the explanation on paper dolls. >_>) But seriously what the heck happened? Blue Gender, nothing. Kiddy Grade, nothing. Just that piece of paper with the information and conatct info on the back that looks like the printer that did it still used tractor feed. Heck there’s not even pretty art on either side of the page. Aside from some contextual images., or maybe it’s done up all sci-fi. Come one anime companies. When we buy this stuff we pay for it we should get some form of amusement aside from your nails on a chalkboard dubs. We, as in people other than me, pay n arm and a leg most cases, don’t you think we deserve this? And seriously, Japan tends to get even wickeder stuff bundled with their dvd’s. Why can’t we get more posters? I’ll point out now I live in the middle of nowhere, my “town” has just over 1,000 people in it… the nearest city is two hours away and has…well my province, which is the same thing as a state, has less people than most American towns. So my anime shopping occurs whenever Wal Mart decides to put on one of it’s sales of stuff that hasn’t been popular for the last two or more years. Or when I fish a disc of Project arms out of a Giant Tiger discount bin… I paid 2$ for that. Well admittedly there may actually be a shop in town that sells “current” stuff. By current I mean stuff I finished watching last year that’s all of a sudden brand new because it just made it to North America… And in some cases stuff that’s stuff I already saw but I don’t know it because the name changed to something incomprehensible. (Yes I’m looking at YOU “Wallflower”) But seriously, I want cool things… anime related things… I want stickers and posters and stick posters… and uhm… whatever else fits in dvd cases. Then again I also want to be paid for doing nothing and to sleep till noon the rest of my life.
A bit of an update on the show now that I’m a whole eight or so episodes in. The musics still good when you actually get to those nice fighting tracks. The eyecatch song is back to normal as well. I only have one little problem with this show right now. It’s turned into a slice of life show. All that’s happened is we follow Yuji and Shana around doing whatever happens to come up. There’s been little to no actual fighting. Episodes are still interesting but I liked the first season for the action parts as well as the random bits. Hopefully it picks up soon.
Posted by uthek 
Posted by uthek 
Posted by uthek 
