Finishing the last third of Hidamari Sketch Honeycomb, my favorite episode was the ninth, which comprised of the landlady (hence referred to with a capital L) dropping by to play The Game of Life with everyone. While Landlady is cool enough on her own, her interactions with the rest of the cast revealed more of herself with the ever slightest pinch of melancholy and brightness that the series has.
It made her cooler than ever before.
In my high school days, I used to read The Wheel of Time, working my way from the first book to, by the end of my senior year, the tenth book. I remember the first few books fondly (up to the fifth). Not so much for the other half, and I gave up on the tenth book 2/5ths in. The pacing became glacially slow, and the tenth book featured plot lines that were happening concurrently with the ninth book, which was a thousand pages long.
One more book got released during my college days, and then the author died. The series still had one more book to go, which the new author split into three. The last book just came out last month.
I want to revisit the series again someday, now that it’s finished, but we’re talking about several thousand pages to go. Every time I think about The Wheel of Time, I can only sigh in relief that the story I once followed had finally concluded after so long.
How does this relate to anime and manga? Well, there are a lot of long-running manga that suffer The Wheel of Time’s same malaise, of taking ages to end. One might ask if they even intend to end. Some have even sacrificed coherence just to keep on running.
Characters I Like will be a new, irregular post series that will have me talking about, well, fictional characters that I like, and why I like them. While my reasons for liking characters are subjective and often silly, I will do my best to make my opinions relevant to the reader.
That said, the first one will be:
Name: Suzuko Kanzaki
Origin: AKB0048 (anime)
When I watched the first episode of Tamako Market, Midori stood out to me despite the scant scenes she was in. Maybe I’ve finally configured my yuri goggles to work properly, but it was clear as day that she harbored some feelings for Tamako, which was further expounded in the next episode.
Every year, I make it a point to watch at least one long anime, and the first series of City Hunter filled that need. Without much prior knowledge, I dived into the show.
I instantly fell in love.
City Hunter is an 80′s Shounen Jump title. Shounen manga nowadays tend to use gimmicky premises to rein readers in, but City Hunter has a very simple formula: Ryo Saeba is a perfect shot and a pervert, who takes jobs from beautiful women. There aren’t any ninjas or pirates or death gods here–City Hunter is a classy show that doesn’t rely on fancy settings or eye-catching visual styles to sell.
Gundam AGE is a failure, in multiple ways. First, it achieved abysmal ratings, beating Gundam X’s all-time low. I think this is well within the experimental nature of the show, where Gundam tried to become a children’s TV anime. I find it a shame because the first arc was pretty good, the second arc even better, but kids probably didn’t have the patience to stick around for that.
Humanity has declined.
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, or Jintai, is one of those shows that you can appreciate without having to chew the deepest portions of to enjoy. I honestly think it’s an achievement, in the sense that it is a smart and deep show, but you don’t have to get both to like it. The entire thing is made really well, from the jumbled chronology of story arcs, the colorful presentation of oppressive themes to lend an ironic tone that combats heavy-handedness, down to Mai Nakahara‘s sardonic voice-acting, that you could enjoy them on your own. But if you peel layers and layers back, you can get engrossed with the finer details. It doesn’t demand you to think, but it teases you.
