Gen X Otaku 1971: the OG blog

Finished Season 1, Maria Holic

Maria Holic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I finished up Season 1 of Maria Holic last night.  I did enjoy watching the first four episodes on the big screen at Alamo Drafthouse.  The ADR cast & crew turned up for the screening and I finally got to meet and take a picture with Monica Rial, who plays the lead antagonist.  The audience reaction definitely made the show.  It was slapstick and funny and absurd.  Unfortunately, the plot went nowhere after that and the main character made no progress and became less sympathetic to the audience.  The main character is voiced by the same voice talent who voiced Excel of Excel Saga way back in the day for ADV Films.  Or rather voiced Excel until she blew her voice and a replacement actress was recast to finish production.  It actually fit with the fiction of Excel Saga after Excel gets shot (and cast off) by her master.  That event shakes her to the core and she becomes a much more sympathetic, far less zany character from that point forward.

The same fate, alas, does not befall the Maria Holic protagonist, though by the end of the series I was definitely hoping it would.

Apparently Maria Holic was originally an old sub-only title that for some reason Sentai Filmworks decided finally needed to be dubbed into English.  Chris Ayres declared he hadn't had this much fun dubbing a title since he worked on Nerima Daikon Brothers (which I actually liked).  It's just too bad the ADR director's enjoyment didn't bleed over into my experience as a viewer finishing Season 1, which was not enjoyable in the least.

This is a series that should've remained sub-only.  The jokes fall flat most of the time because too much of it is imbedded in Japanese culture in a way that doesn't easily translate.  It's very Japan Otaku-centric insofar as it references other anime & manga that are (I presume) popular in Japan but that I know nothing about.  The lame attempts to make American pop culture references fail more often than they succeed.  Most of the humor comes at protagonist Kanako Miyamae's (宮前 かなこ Miyamae Kanako^?) expense.  Kanako is a closet lesbian attending an all girls Catholic school in Japan.  Her backstory is her mother attended there as a student years ago, and met her father, who was a teacher at the time (slightly scandalous).  Kanako's "problem" isn't that she's homosexual, it's that she's a total "horn dog" who wants to fuck anything with a pulse and a vagina.  She's so desperate to have sex, so completely overstimulated by her attractive classmates all around her that she gushes rivers of blood from her nose (a common anime & manga trope based on a Japanese "old wives tale" kind of cultural thing).

Oh, and the titular character, Mariya Shidō (祇堂 鞠也 Shidō Mariya^?), is a cross-dressing teen pretty boy with a mean streak a mile wide.  He has a twin sister who's cross dressing as a boy at a nearby all-boys academy.  The reason for this has to do with some obscure stipuation in their grandfather's will and they'll void their inheritance if they don't comply with this requirement.

Mariya Shidō (祇堂 鞠也 Shidō Mariya^?) is the first person Kanako lays eyes on and she falls in love with "her" at first sight.  But Kanako quickly notices that touching Mariya makes her break out in hives, the same reaction she gets touching ANY male.  Kanako quickly discovers Mariya's secret when she walks in on Mariya changing clothes and talking like a dude to his loyal (and very rude) maid, Matsurika Shinōji (汐王寺 茉莉花 Shinōji Matsurika^?), who is helping her master attach his fake breasts under a corset.  Mariya threatens Kanako and forces Kanako to become his roommate to keep her under close watch.

The show is supposed to be a sex & relationships comedy, I guess.  But Kanako is so inept she can't initiate even a single genuine relationship.  And she's got the sex drive (and focus) of a man.  She reminds me a little of Yamada from B Gata HK (Yamada's first time) only far less funny.  This cast of characters are so ill served by this dumb plot.  This could've been a sensitive yet funny "Yuri" melodrama.  The only "relationship" Kanako is sort of involved with is an odd kind of "bodyguard" relationship with Nanami Kiri (桐 奈々美 Kiri Nanami^?), a cold, aloof, vaguely Aspergian girl, whom a teacher tells to protect Kanako and look out for her, mainly from a sense of loyalty of having known and befriended Kanako's mother years before.  Kiri takes the bold step of feigning to be Kanako's girlfriend, even though she's totally straight and interested in men.  She wears glasses and is a liberal arts nerd but terrible at math & science.  She's very literal minded, a little awkward, and nearly as aloof as Mariya's maid but her rudeness comes more from her blunt manner than any mean-spirited desire.  Like I said,  very Aspie.  Even Kiri shows more emotional growth as a character than Kanako, for whom we rapidly lose any sympathy by series end.

There are a lot of weird mysteries and subplots that I found I completely lost any interest in solving by the end.

I know there's a 2nd season of Maria Holic that has been dubbed and available for pre-order as of this writing, but I don't think I'll be picking it up.  If anything, I'll probably be selling off my Season 1 set to Half-Price Books in the future.  This was both a waste of time and money for me.  The whole entertainment value I got out of it was watching Ep.1-4 for free at Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park with the cast & crew.  Beyond that, blah.

Manga Minute: NGE Spinoffs

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I previously discussed on my Ani.Me blogging space, I've really been getting into some of the Neon Genesis Evangelion "spin off" manga; including series like Angelic Days, or The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, or Campus Apocalypse.  I haven't read the original manga to NGE, only these "alt universe" titles.

I started with Angelic Days (vols. 1-2), but more recently began The Shinji Ikari Raising Project (vols. 1-2) and look forward to trying out volume 1 of Campus Apocalypse.  I must say, I do like the "softer side" of Asuka we get to see in the former two narratives above.  Asuka is reimagined as Shinji Ikari's childhood friend and therefore (by the laws of Anime & Manga) a rival to be his soulmate, specifically the rival of Rei Ayanami.  This is the Asuka the fans WANT, the true textbook Tsundere. 

I do feel I should go back and read the actual original NGE manga for comparision, but I don't think Asuka as she appears in the original NGE anime is actually unproblematically classified in the Tsundere category.  She's more often just a crazy b*tch, and the only reason I cut her slack is because her mom went crazy & committed suicide, and little Asuka was the one who found the body.  That will f*ck anyone up.  Asuka in the original NGE really mainly has eyes for Kaji, practically rending her dress and throwing herself at the older man and all but demanding him to f*ck her.  He brushes her off, of course.  Asuka does show some awkward, halting affections for Shinji, like the time she tries to cook for him, or demands him to kiss her, or slips into his sleeping quarters and lies beside him in only her underwear.  Shinji demands to know what she thinks she's doing, but she shushes him and asserts herself, lying next to him but with her back turned.

In End of Evangelion, Shinji masturbates over Asuka's comatose body at the hospital, and then later after Shinji decides to rebuild the world, his "new Eve" seems to be Asuka.  It is Asuka whom he reforms from the primordial soup of prexistence.  There is some ambivalence about what Asuka says to Shinji...something along the lines of "you disgust me", "you sicken me", but some critics allege in the Japanese original that it could even be a hint at morning sickness, i.e. with Asuka pregnant.

The Rebuild movies, at least for 1.0 and 2.0, seem like they yield to fan pressure and give them the more straightforward Tsundere Asuka who may be conflicted about how she feels about Shinji but definitely shows strong attraction to him on some level, and jealously at Rei as a potential rival to Shinji's affections.  Her affectionate feelings to Shinji are amplified in the Rebuilds 1.0 & 2.0 from what they were in the original NGE and the End of Evangelion finale.

Having started Angelic Days and The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, I definitely get the appeal of this "softer side" of Asuka.  It makes her a more likeable character and someone with a lot of love in her heart, even if on the surface she's in denial about how she feels, and it takes Rei Ayanami actually actively flirting with Shinji to goad Asuka into action and force her to think about her actual feelings for Shinji, deep down.  I also admit I like the more talkative and friendly-but-shy Rei Ayanami--and again, this popular-with-fans version of Rei is what we are served up in the Rebuild movies, whilst in the original NGE Anime, Rei is more emotionally distant and cold.  She only perks up around Gendo Ikari (Shinji's dad) and for literally no one else, at least to begin with.

I won't even get into all the Meta-Rei weirdness of End of Evangelion, which has to be seen to be believed.

In other manga related news, I recently finished Vol.4 of the Oreimo manga, and am going to finish volume 1 of the English manga for Watamote ("No matter how I look at it, it's you guy's fault I'm not popular!") this weekend, most likely.  I'd like to start Vol.1 of Campus Apocalypse, which recasts the NGE characters into a kind of "boy detective" narrative.  I was hoping to request the latest Toradora manga via Interlibrary loan (which is how I'm reading the rest of these) but unfortunately the latest volume I haven't read (Vol.6) was only published this year and is thus too new to loan for most libraries.  Vol.5 was published (and bought by me) in 2012.  It took another 2 years for this Volume 6 to get translated and published.  I put it on my Amazon wish list for future reference.

With respect to Digital Manga, I've held off so far buying any Viz or Yen Press digital manga.  I have however purchased older Original English Language Manga via Amazon Kindle, and some of them are actually very good and entertaining.  I've also enjoyed reading the Avatar: The Last Air Bender graphic novels via Kindle as well.  The most fun OEL I've read so far has been Amazing Agent Luna, along with Nightschool: The Weirn Books.  It's really handy to read these in Kindle and I hope more actual Japanese manga decide to experiment with availabilty via Kindle rather than via a publisher's proprietary app like Viz or Yen Press.  One also hopes the Japanese manga publishers learn that they can't get away with charging the same price for a hardcopy or paperback edition as they do for the digital copy.  American publishers always charge less for their Kindle editions as an incentive to buy.  Japanese publishing needs to learn the same lesson but so far have not.

Finished Fate/Zero on Neon Alley

At long last, I finished the Fate/Zero series, dubbed in English, on the Neon Alley channel app on my PS3 at home.  I did ultimately like how it wraps up and folds neatly into the start of Fate/Stay Night.  The scenes jogged my memory and I remembered the backstory of the original series' protagonist.

As far as visuals go, no question, Fate/Zero wins hands down, though Fate/Stay Night: Ultimate Bladeworks (condensed re-cap movie) does give it a run for its money and that one is my hands down favorite of the entire franchise.

In terms of story, Fate/Zerois my least favorite.  I much prefered the story of the original series, Fate/Stay Night.  The characters were more sympathetic and I cared about their fates much more.  Ultimate Bladeworks is a highly condensed "recap" movie in one sense, but it also takes the story in a radically different direction, too.  It practically must do so because it hasn't got the time to cram all the events of the original series into a single feature film.

My biggest complaint about Fate/Zeroare the intolerable number of "expositition dump" episodes where the characters do nothing but monolgue about the world and how it got that way, and so much of it is jargon-laden, never explained, and often quite opaque.  It's just a confusing word salad made to sound deep and impressive but without really conveying much by way of useful information.  The first episode is by far the worst offender of this; but alas it's not the only episode guilty of this sin against good storytelling.  There is a later impromptu drinking session between Gilgamesh (aka "Archer"), Iskander (Alexander the Great, aka "Rider"), and Arthuria ("Saber") that is nothing but banter back and forth, mostly between the seemingly more experienced ancient kings arguing their worldview against the more progressive Medieval king.  It is all very wordy but not terribly witty and ends up being quite boring.  If you're going to have lots of dialogue, at least make it interesting dialogue with genuine entertainment value.

Anyway, Arthuria ("Saber") is of course my favorite character, voiced by three separate voice actresses but believably the same character.  She's more of an archetype made flesh than an actual real person, so I can forgive the casting changes for her from work to work.  My next favorite character would be the Knight of the Fianna otherwise known as "Lancer", wielding the mighty Gae Bolga spear/lance of Irish Celtic legend, reputedly once wielded by the mighty Cúchulainn himself.  Lancer is at his best and most noble in Fate/Zero and Ultimate Bladeworks.  He's honestly kind of a brutal asshole early in Fate/Stay Night and somewhat redeems himself only much later on into the series.  I actually own a Lancer figurine that I recently picked up at Anime Matsuri Con here in Houston two weeks ago.  I also picked up a smallish 3rd impact Askua complete with eyepatch and painter's cap with "kitty ears" (modded to fit her communication gear hairpiece underneath).

I'm a little unclear what Neon Alley's plans are after April 1st.  I had earlier gotten the impression that only the "live" channel would be going away, but that the "catch up" feature on the app would not only remain but also expand to become a more truly VOD type product, and that to watch Neon Alley shows over mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, etc) requires creating a Hulu+ account. 

But in the latest update from Neon Alley, I now get the distinct impression that the native "app" for Neon Alley on PS3 (and PS4) will be going away entirely and the content will ONLY be accessible via the Hulu+ "app" on those systems and ONLY NeonAlley.com (website) would be free of charge to access from one's PC.  If this is the case, then that really kind of sucks.

Anyway, I decided to devote this evening to push and finish Fate/Zero while the Neon Alley "app" is still up and running.

Ani.Me is on Hiatus, so this blog comes OFF Hiatus

My favorite Anime News Blog after ANN, called Ani.Me, is unforunately now on hiatus.  They had a neat feature where you could join as a community member and had very basic but easy-to-use blogging software that I used frequently to jot down first impresssion after local Anime screenings at Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park in Katy, Texas.

As the notice on their website now states:
Sadly, as of March 2014, the current Ani.ME site is being closed. Hopefully we will find the resources to re-launch better than ever, but for now at least, we must take the site offline. Until we figure out what the long-term fate will be, we will still be active on our Facebook page and you can also sign up below to be emailed if/when we relaunch.

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I first noticed when the mobile app associated with Ani.Me stopped updating earlier this month.  I thought it was just an app malfunction and decided to head to the main site to get caught up on their anime news feed that the app seemingly wasn't loading any longer.  To my great surprise and disappointment, I found the hiatus notice above.

To be honest, I've never much cared for this Typepad blog platform, I still have sour grapes at being forced to migrate it from the much more user-friendly but defunct Vox.com; I tried to keep blogging here for awhile, but the time between posts grew longer and longer and longer.  When I discovered the blogging platform over on Ani.Me, I signed up on a whim.  When I saw how easy & basic it was to operate, I started blogging regularly.  Initially the idea was to compose rough drafts on the fly over there then clean them up and republish a better version here.  Eventually I just started blogging over there full time because of the ease and simplicity of doing so.  No graphics, sure, no fancy HTML or other coding, but such forced economy of expression was actually liberating for awhile.  And I do have to heap praise on the site's Content Director, LB, whom I still follow on Twitter, for always looking in on my blog and sometimes adding helpful feedback comments and other responses to my writings.  I was always very flattered by the attention.  I'm a regular correspondent to the 2Lazy2Botaku podcast and would sometimes send them links to my own Ani.Me blog compositions instead of a full email.

Ani.Me further writes:
"...We grew up watching anime and so our team started Ani.ME as a way to do what we love. We started to grow and for a while things were great. However the past year has been a struggle to keep the site alive.. For over a year, Ani.ME hasn't been able to make enough money to cover our server costs or our staff writers. To keep the site up, the founding team has been putting in money from our day jobs to cover costs and pay everyone, however, we can't afford to do so anymore. The site is a custom built platform and over time, things started breaking and we didn't have the funds to fix it. Also, many of you may have heard of issues with our lead editor and some staff writers. This was due to not being able to properly cover costs for the last few months. We hoped we could find a solution but so far, all options have been taking longer than we could bear. It would be unfair to not pay our writers. By shutting down the site, we can at least cover paying our writers for the work they've done up to now.

If you have enjoyed Ani.ME up to now, please do let us know. You can email our Co-founder Chris at [email protected]. If you want to help out, you can also make a donation using the Paypal button below. We will use any donations to cover staff costs and if we can, try to re-launch. To do so, we would need to be able to rebuild the site on a lower cost platform and find a way to make enough money to properly cover writers and hosting costs. Please know that we DO want to re-launch, and are working on ways to make it possible."

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Well, that's unfortunate to hear.  I did actually apply to write for them at one point in the past, but I knew it was a long shot, not least because my own viewing habits and preferences were in stark contrast to theirs.  I'm a dub fan, they're all about the bleeding edge of what's hot in Japan right now.  I suggested I could cover N.American DVD/Blu-Ray releases but they were looking for help managing coverage of each new season coming out in Japan, just staying on top of that firehose gusher of content.  I understood, no big deal.

They very recently posted new job adverts looking for a new addition to the writing staff, but alas, even if someone did get that job, they may still be waiting on their first and possibly last paycheck, at least for awhile.  ANN were looking for writers as well some time back but unlike with Ani.Me, I didn't bother to apply.

There's a local design store that has a weird name, the last part of which includes the words ...and Infinite Anime...which caught my eye.  I did eventually make it over to the place to look around and talk to the owner.   I wish him luck, but I'm afraid it's probably only a matter of time before he'll be forced to shutter his shop, unless the design side of his business keeps the doors open.

His main focus seems to be competitive Anime-style card games, which don't interest me in the least.  He didn't have any PVC figurines when I dropped by (though he said he was planning to pick some up at the then upcoming Anime Matsuri convention).  He had a few Anime titles that caught my eye and piqued mild curiosity, but way too much stuff on VHS and a lot on DVD that I've either already seen or own myself.  The only brick and mortar store I still buy Anime from (infrequently) is Fry's Electronics, and even their selection is dimished from what it used to be (though nowhere near as drastically anemic as Best Buy these days).

I have a FUNimation Elite subscription which I got for my birthday and use a lot of.  I also have a Neon Alley subscription.  That's going free come April 1st.  Apparently the "app" I have on my PS3 will cease to function entirely after that date.  This annoys me because while I knew the "live stream" channel would be going away, it was my understanding that the "catch  up" feature would be expanded as the main Neon Alley portal going forward and be free, besides NeonAlley.com

But the latest press release makes it sound like if I want to access Neon Alley via the PS3 in the future after April 1st, I'll be forced to do so via Hulu+.  This annoys me enormously.  I suppose I can make do with NeonAlley.com on my PC, but I shouldn't have to pay on PS3 either.  I could accept having to have Hulu+ for mobile access...iPad, iPhone, Android, etc.  But Neon Alley had earlier indicated that the Catch Up feature would expand to be the main feature via the app and via NeonAlley.com, and now it seems only NeonAlley.com via the PC will be a free portal and PS3 and PS4 access will be shunted over to Hulu+ EXCLUSIVELY.  WHICH SUCKS BALLS.

I do have an HDMI cable hooked up to my mom's PC, so it's actually not a huge deal to stream NeonAlley.com stuff to the TV (just have to put up with subpar computer speaker audio), but I'd rather I didn't have to.  I'd like to keep accessing Neon Alley via my PS3 native app like always.

The PS3 Crunchyroll "app" is very limited for non-subscribers, while the iPad version of the Crunchyroll app gives you full access, albeit advertising supported, not unlike Crackle.com in that respect.

I'm nearly caught up with all my Neon Alley shows at the moment (bearing down on finishing Fate/Zero) and even bought some on DVD when the price was right (LaGrange).

I'm very grateful for my FUNimation subscription since I need to cut back on my physical media purchases.  This year Sentai Filmworks is going to get the majority of my physical media budget since Anime Network isn't available on PS3 or Roku.  I do happen to have a Roku player and thus get full use out of my FUNI subscription.  The animation quality is sometimes lacking when a show first loads but this quickly fixes itself within a minute or two and isn't really much of a distraction.  I've watched some shows that were guilty pleasures that I will never own on DVD but am glad to have seen nonetheless (Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero).

And I will get through the original Ruroni Kenshin (dubbed) on Crackle.com one of these days.

Anyway, I'll be mourning the loss of Ani.Me for some time to come.  It was a fun little website.