I almost had Hyakko poached from me, but we’ve come to an agreement, Kaze and I.

In my long absence from Yukan in terms of episodic blogging I suppose I have neglected Machiavelli’s rule of taking over the world by building settlements, and so far my settlements at Yukan seem rather dusty since I haven’t posted a review of some actual Anime in a while. Here are some short reviews of Anime series I’ve been watching since I’ve been expanding into other media such as radio spots and winning blogging competitions for the Sydney Morning Herald:

Welcome to the NHK! isn’t the newest Anime on the block, and it certainly isn’t the most wholesome I could be watching, but it is certainly entertaining and gives me hope that there are far more perverse individuals on this Earth than me, but as Sweeney Todd says, “We all deserve to die… even you Mrs. Lovett even I”. Rather than judging the characters of NHK too harshly, they serve as a reminder of what can happen if a man is pushed over the edge into madness, particularly when some of the madness is his own fault. Saki the nice girl is a sort of reverse Marla Singer from Fight Club, and really Welcome to the NHK! bears the resemblance of Fight Club for Japanese otaku people.

I have not read the NHK novel so the plot remains unspoiled and as of yet I am still wincing as I draw closer and closer to the ending, wondering when in a halfway series lull in the depravity the awful stuff starts to happen again. Please don’t spoil the ending of this series for me as I’ve never seen it before, besides, it’s more fun seeing me revolted at things I didn’t expect than for me to see it coming and lessen its effect.

Moving on there’s another series I’ve been following which I’ve been enjoying, called Strawberry Panic.

Baka-Raptor informed me of this one, and I hope the pacing picks up after the first two episodes. I haven’t watched an episode in a while so I forget the character’s names, but as far as I know from experience, when it comes to me interpreting Anime for the first time, unless the characters are already familiar, there’s a fair bit of “Ooh Blue Haired Girlie did this” (Lucky Star initially caused me some character identification problems with Tsusaka and Kagami, being a twin myself I finally felt the frustration of others trying to tell me and my brother apart). Basically Reddish/Brownish haired girl on the right of this picture (at least in the first two episodes) is being stalked by the senior white haired girl on the left, but the problem for her is that the Reddish/Brownish haired girl on the right is straight. Is it love? We don’t know yet, I’ve only watched two episodes, one of which involves a library chase scene.

One of the reasons I’ve been away from actual Anime episodic blogging is that I’ve been producing some “popular art” of my own for the first time in three months and so far I have a page of an illustrated short story. Maybe one day it will be collected into a graphic novel or something, but it’s not something I can really talk about in an Anime post. Even though it is Anime related, such pimping would be unprofessional.

Hopefully once I catch up with Hyakko Kaze and I will be able to settle our differences and blog the series together as nature intended, since with my lulzy sense of humor and Kaze’s skill of actually getting the character names right, who knows what we could bring to the Hyakko discussion table? As far as I know us two are the only ones who cared about Hyakko from the beginning, Issa-sa certainly didn’t give Torako and her friends a chance.