A thoughtful response to current anime.
The last episode of Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, aka Daily Lives of High School Boys, aka Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, aka Daily Lives of High School Boys was an excellent half-hour of comedy. I’ve heard tell that this next episode isn’t so good, but let’s judge for ourselves by watching episode 6 of Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou.
…thirty minutes pass…
Last episode on Mirai Nikki (which was two weeks ago: blame inconsistent fansubber schedules, or perhaps the release of Crusader Kings 2), Yukiteru was trapped in a building that was being blown up by enemy diary users. The floor was collapsing out from under him, and he was presented with a choice: grab for his father’s hand, and risk being betrayed by someone who acts like he loves him but actually only cares about money, or grab for Yuno’s hand, and risk being betrayed by someone who actually loves him but is super crazy. The unstated third choice is for him to grab for no one’s hand, and deal with his problems on his own, but that’s not the sort of thing Yukiteru does. The main theme of Mirai Nikki is about Yukiteru relying on others and getting burned for it. Once Yukiteru awakens to a proper existentialist sense of despair and abandonment, there will be nowhere for his character to go. But maybe I’m wrong! Maybe, against all odds, he will take responsibility for his own life in episode 17 of Mirai Nikki.
…thirty minutes pass…
Last episode on Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, aka Daily Lives of High School Boys, aka Nichibros, aka Manshi Brobrosei bro Nichibro, the titular high school boys got together with some less-than-titular high school girls and held a culture festival. It was good fun, but it did mean growing the female cast quite a bit. Some of the girls at the festival were girls we’d already been introduced to, too (the genderswapped main characters): this means they’ve now achieved the status of “recurring characters”, even outside of their little “High School Girls Are Funky” corner. I guess it might not be such a bad thing if the show were to go from being a male version of Hidamari Sketch to being the spiritual successor to School Rumble, because hey, I liked School Rumble. Still, I hope they keep focus on the guys in episode 5 of Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou.
…thirty minutes pass…
The last episode of Mirai Nikki ended with our heroes in the hospital, stripped of their diaries. Well, to be clear, Yukiteru and Yuno were in the hospital – the only character in this show who could really claim to be a “hero” was hatcheted to death by Yuno in episode 5. Things are looking pretty bad for our morally-ambiguous protagonists, but now Minene, the wild card, has shown up. Is she friend, or is she foe? If she’s foe this is gonna be an awful short season, so I’m gonna guess “friend”. I’m just not sure what they have to offer her as potential alliance partners, but I guess we’ll find out in episode 16 of Mirai Nikki.
…thirty minutes pass…
Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, aka Daily Lives of High School Boys, aka DaiLi (pronounce “Day Lie”), aka DaiLi (pronounced “Daily”). Sorry for the sentence fragment, but I don’t really have anything to say about it. I just needed to mention it, so that it would be salient in the discourse, and you wouldn’t be shocked when we suddenly started watching episode 4 of Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou.
…thirty minutes pass…
The last episode of Mouretsu Pirates was pretty slow and not very enthralling. The show has had pacing problems for a while now; there is only so long the promise of a cute girl in a pirate hat will be able to keep me strung along. Now that the characters are all in space, hopefully things will start picking up. If not, episode 4 of Mouretsu Pirates might be the last one I watch.
…thirty minutes pass…
Apparently the group I normally follow for Mirai Nikki is on hiatus for some nonsense reason. GotWoot, I like your subs, but the pattern is, first you start trolling, then your quality slips, then you become a joke of a group like gg. But the spice must flow, so I’m following a lower-tier subgroup while they are off being prissy drama-queens. Last time on Mirai Nikki, Yukiteru had just broken up with/escaped the clutches of his girlfriend/kidnapper Yuno. Now he’s hanging out with Akise, who is great, but you know, no Yuno. He’s also with Kousaka, the guy who used to bully him and who now is apparently reformed? Anyway, Kousaka has a future diary, or maybe not, and somebody is able to spy on it, somehow, and there is a lot of stuff going on that needs to be explained. Hopefully episode 15 of Mirai Nikki will explain it.
…thirty minutes pass…
Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, aka Daily Lives of High School Boys, aka DKN, aka Detroit Kettle kNitty has been pretty good so far. It might have the dubious honor of being my favorite show of this season if I never get around to watching Nisemonogatari. I had planned to watch Nisemonogatari this season, but I thought I should rewatch Bakemonogatari first, and it turns out that Bakemonogatari is really good and I have been wanting to savor each delicious episode? Episode 12, especially, is the best episode of anime since season 1 of Haruhi. Anyway, I’ll start posting about Nisemonogatari… sometime, maybe. For now, let’s watch episode 3 of Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou.
…thirty minutes pass…
Listen to the cool track featured above! There used to be a DDL link in the Youtube description, but I guess the forces of government oppression have shut down Megaupload forever. We’ll see how long the Youtube link stays functional.
This song is off of the character album for Aioi Yukko from the anime Nichijou. Specifically, it references and extends upon one particular scene in Nichijou in which Yukko, the “class clown” type character, tries telling her friends a pun, but they do not show any reaction, and continue to do such even as her comedic efforts escalate. The song consists of a bunch of puns in rapid succession (the title claims there are a hundred, I’m not sure I believe it but don’t intend to count) alternating with impassioned pleas for her friends to laugh or smile or show some kind of reaction to the gags she spend all night coming up with.
I guess I sort of identify with Yukko in this song. This year at Christmas, my young cousin told me that I was not funny like my brother. I told her I liked to believe I just had a more subtle sense of humor, but it still sort of hurt my feelings. I tell lots of great jokes! Consider the following: two groups of waterfowl walk into a bar. The third one ducks.
I also identify with Yukko’s love of puns. Unfortunately I only understand maybe a third of the puns in the song, but they mostly seem to be puns playing on one native Japanese word that sounds like a foreign loanword. There’s one that plays on two foreign loanwords that sound alike, though, which is translatable: “My tire got a flat, so I had to retire”. That might give you an idea of the quality of the rest of the puns. But, you know, the worse a pun is, the better it is! The same goes for music, which is why I enjoy the denpa genre and crave as many anime character albums as I can get my hands on.
Ano Natsu de Matteru (Waiting That Summer) was one of the shows I put on the waitlist for this season. It was billed as an “adolescent romantic comedy”, by the same people who did some show I’d never heard of. So I figured I’d wait and see what people were saying about it before deciding whether to watch it. And they’re saying positive things! (Unlike the other waitlisted show, Another, that people seem pretty lukewarm about.) So let’s watch episode 1 of Ano Natsu de Matteru and see if it lives up to the hype.
…thirty minutes pass…
