beccastareyes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccastareyes) wrote2010-08-29 01:23 pm
beccastareyes) wrote2010-08-29 01:23 pm
Entry tags:
Anime Club
First meeting of the semester was yesterday. Well, the first business meeting was Friday, in which I forgot to bring my annual dues and started the arrangements to transfer the Club Archive from the old Archivist (me) to the new Archivist. But the first showing was yesterday. We're watching 8 shows this semester -- we have 9 slots per showing, but there's also movies and OAVs and stuff, and usually some stuff gets pushed into End-of-Semester marathon.
As for the shows, these are my impressions so far:
It was really hard to judge a lot of these shows since a lot of them decided to either open with a two-parter or are just things that don't have strong breaks between episodes. Thus there's no 'this is a plot you watched for 25 minutes'. Darker than Black was first, and we have a mysterious hidden-supernatural thing going on, with the police-like people trying to track things down, and a scientist and mysterious new person on the run for some reason. Sola and Now and Then, Here and There both had this thing where the first episode plot can be described as 'we spend half the episode following a quirky-but-ordinary boy/young man around, he meets a mysterious girl who suddenly has Shit happen to her, and he gets involved because he has more chivalry than common sense'. I did like The Skull Man, where there was another supernatural plus odd conspiracies, but I actually got a sense of the lead characters as being interesting people.
Next was Toradora, which gets me into a rant about tsundere and yandere characters. Might be a bit odd, since I am a fan of characters such as Lina Inverse and Lafiel, but I'm particular about my Angry or Ice-Queen Young Women versus Hapless Male Partners. Lina works for me because I get the sense she's temperamental, not insane, and I rarely get the sense she explodes at people for unintended slights. The female lead... I love me some tiny-yet-fierce women, but she started to cross the line into 'bully' when she threatened to beat the male lead with a wooden stick because she put a love letter to his friend in his bag by mistake, which he may or may not have read. Interesting counterpoint to the plot of to the first Utena episode, where Saionji posts a love letter Utena's best friend wrote to him on the school bulletin board, and she tells him that, since he's the captain of the fencing team, he can face her in a duel. Here at least Saionji is an active jerk and Utena is facing him as an equal, not breaking into his room with a wooden sword.
After that, we started our string of mecha anime -- and CJAS love it some classic mecha anime -- with RahXephon, which caught my attention well enough to keep me watching, and Gunbuster, which apparently is one of those Giant Robots versus Aliens, but I liked the female lead and her friend (though the occasional fanservice was a bit eye-rolly).
As I mentioned, next comes Utena -- yay Utena! -- and the final show is Eden of the East, which is sufficiently new that we have to watch it streaming from Funimation's website. So far, we have a female lead who runs into a mysterious man with amnesia and nothing but a cell phone and a gun, while she's throwing rocks through the White House's fence. He distracts the cops so she can get away, she gives him her coat and then has to chase him down because she forgets her passport and wallets in her coat pocket. Meanwhile, he has no clue what's going on, or what he was involved with, but he offers to help the girl return to Japan afters he misses her flight. And then the show ends with showing some kind of Disaster in Japan on the news as
I was a bit impressed here, as the DC cops and cab drivers shown spoke good English, though there was some wonkiness when the male lead would respond in Japanese and be understood. (Suspension of disbelief here -- we have a charismatic naked guy with amnesia for whom this is apparently normal, and an apartment full of enough fake documents and weird stuff that he suspects he may have been a terrorist. For all I know, people may just understand him on reflex.) And the scenery looked good, though folks quibbled with the lack of traffic in downtown DC, except when cars were needed. Plus, I liked the characters -- both this and The Skull Man did a good job of immediately making me want to follow these people around.
There's a bit of a problem, in that the two shows I really want to see -- Utena and Eden of the East -- are the last two slots. The club is scheduled to end at 11:05 PM, but that's optimistic. There are two buses that run close to my house between 11 PM and Sunday morning. One leaves central campus at 11:09 PM, which will mean leaving as soon as Eden of the East's credits roll, and then dashing across the street to catch it. Staying for the credits -- as I did last night -- seems to mean that I miss the bus. The second is at 11:53 PM and involves walking down Leib Slope to across the street from the dorms*. Which will be all kinds of not-fun in the winter. Downside of being a grad student who lives off-campus.
Another downside is that a lot of the members of the club who I spoke a lot with have left, leaving only a couple of familiar faces. So I'm a lot less social. Oh, well, it still gets me to see anime on Saturday nights.
* The first thing you learn at Cornell is the essential bits of 'never assume a route is a shortcut without a topological map'. Ithaca is built on fossil lake shores as our lake lowered when the glaciers retreated. So you get this pattern of mostly level ground, then a steep hill down to more level ground. My office is on a tiny slope up from the main north-south road through Central Campus, and West Campus (where a good portion of the dorms are) is down Leib Slope from Central Campus. I've walked up the slope occasionally -- if I was an undergrad living in West, I'd be in a lot better shape.
Thinking about doing one of those 30 Days... memes, since I was linked to a general one on anime.
As for the shows, these are my impressions so far:
It was really hard to judge a lot of these shows since a lot of them decided to either open with a two-parter or are just things that don't have strong breaks between episodes. Thus there's no 'this is a plot you watched for 25 minutes'. Darker than Black was first, and we have a mysterious hidden-supernatural thing going on, with the police-like people trying to track things down, and a scientist and mysterious new person on the run for some reason. Sola and Now and Then, Here and There both had this thing where the first episode plot can be described as 'we spend half the episode following a quirky-but-ordinary boy/young man around, he meets a mysterious girl who suddenly has Shit happen to her, and he gets involved because he has more chivalry than common sense'. I did like The Skull Man, where there was another supernatural plus odd conspiracies, but I actually got a sense of the lead characters as being interesting people.
Next was Toradora, which gets me into a rant about tsundere and yandere characters. Might be a bit odd, since I am a fan of characters such as Lina Inverse and Lafiel, but I'm particular about my Angry or Ice-Queen Young Women versus Hapless Male Partners. Lina works for me because I get the sense she's temperamental, not insane, and I rarely get the sense she explodes at people for unintended slights. The female lead... I love me some tiny-yet-fierce women, but she started to cross the line into 'bully' when she threatened to beat the male lead with a wooden stick because she put a love letter to his friend in his bag by mistake, which he may or may not have read. Interesting counterpoint to the plot of to the first Utena episode, where Saionji posts a love letter Utena's best friend wrote to him on the school bulletin board, and she tells him that, since he's the captain of the fencing team, he can face her in a duel. Here at least Saionji is an active jerk and Utena is facing him as an equal, not breaking into his room with a wooden sword.
After that, we started our string of mecha anime -- and CJAS love it some classic mecha anime -- with RahXephon, which caught my attention well enough to keep me watching, and Gunbuster, which apparently is one of those Giant Robots versus Aliens, but I liked the female lead and her friend (though the occasional fanservice was a bit eye-rolly).
As I mentioned, next comes Utena -- yay Utena! -- and the final show is Eden of the East, which is sufficiently new that we have to watch it streaming from Funimation's website. So far, we have a female lead who runs into a mysterious man with amnesia and nothing but a cell phone and a gun, while she's throwing rocks through the White House's fence. He distracts the cops so she can get away, she gives him her coat and then has to chase him down because she forgets her passport and wallets in her coat pocket. Meanwhile, he has no clue what's going on, or what he was involved with, but he offers to help the girl return to Japan afters he misses her flight. And then the show ends with showing some kind of Disaster in Japan on the news as
I was a bit impressed here, as the DC cops and cab drivers shown spoke good English, though there was some wonkiness when the male lead would respond in Japanese and be understood. (Suspension of disbelief here -- we have a charismatic naked guy with amnesia for whom this is apparently normal, and an apartment full of enough fake documents and weird stuff that he suspects he may have been a terrorist. For all I know, people may just understand him on reflex.) And the scenery looked good, though folks quibbled with the lack of traffic in downtown DC, except when cars were needed. Plus, I liked the characters -- both this and The Skull Man did a good job of immediately making me want to follow these people around.
There's a bit of a problem, in that the two shows I really want to see -- Utena and Eden of the East -- are the last two slots. The club is scheduled to end at 11:05 PM, but that's optimistic. There are two buses that run close to my house between 11 PM and Sunday morning. One leaves central campus at 11:09 PM, which will mean leaving as soon as Eden of the East's credits roll, and then dashing across the street to catch it. Staying for the credits -- as I did last night -- seems to mean that I miss the bus. The second is at 11:53 PM and involves walking down Leib Slope to across the street from the dorms*. Which will be all kinds of not-fun in the winter. Downside of being a grad student who lives off-campus.
Another downside is that a lot of the members of the club who I spoke a lot with have left, leaving only a couple of familiar faces. So I'm a lot less social. Oh, well, it still gets me to see anime on Saturday nights.
* The first thing you learn at Cornell is the essential bits of 'never assume a route is a shortcut without a topological map'. Ithaca is built on fossil lake shores as our lake lowered when the glaciers retreated. So you get this pattern of mostly level ground, then a steep hill down to more level ground. My office is on a tiny slope up from the main north-south road through Central Campus, and West Campus (where a good portion of the dorms are) is down Leib Slope from Central Campus. I've walked up the slope occasionally -- if I was an undergrad living in West, I'd be in a lot better shape.
Thinking about doing one of those 30 Days... memes, since I was linked to a general one on anime.