Evidently, these posts are somewhat like buses – you wait four months for one, then a bunch of them come along at once. Although I guess they aren’t really like buses in so much as it’s rather kind of unlikely that you’d actually wait four months for a bus, and, quite certainly, no-one was actually itching for me to make a Mikan Watch post (I think someone on the Something Awful forums put it best when they exclaimed “Why on Earth would someone spend their time doing that!?”).

(Does the Bus joke actually translate outside of Blighty, or are people just wondering what on Earth I’m going on about here more that usual?)

But, yeah, Motto Marutto Railgun (or MMR for short) – it’s the Index-tan styled gag featurette shipping with the Railgun DVDs and Blu-Rays. I suppose I’ll be throwing together a post on the Railgun release at some point, so I’ll hold off on discussing if for now, but rest assured there’s a Mikan Box in Komoe’s apartment. I’m pretty sure it’s there in Index as well, come to think of it.

Not that it’s particularly clear. I’m pretty sure it say’s Mikan, at least…

Crumbs, it’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. By which I mean a Mikan Watch post, the last of which was way back in September last year, rather than a post in general, which a good couple of weeks ago now. Blame videogames, I guess – I hammered my way through Mass Effect 2, then the Japanese release of Ar Tonelico 3 (hey, it’s probably more legible than the NIS’ English release of AT2 ^^;) over the last couple of weeks, which leaves precious little time for consuming media of a bloggable nature. Except, you know, reading Spice and Wolf and Paprika and watching the second half of Bamboo Blade and watching the first season of, err, Spice and Wolf. Nothing that had me particularly itching to blog, though.

But, anyway, back to point – My-HiME, Mikan Box, episode six. That’s the big Midori episode with the wedding at Shiho’s shrine, for those who can’t remember as far back as 2004. Seriously, this shows six years old already? Well, five, technically, since it started at the end of a year, but time surely does fly.

This is the token “I’m not dead” post, I guess – I mean, I’ve gone almost two weeks here without an update. I’ve been captured by the Dread Spectre of Video Games, I’m afraid. I’m making something of a concerted effort to plow through a good chunk of my backlog, and, frankly, it’s a little hard to find time to watch anime, let alone write about it, when you waste a good twenty-six hours of your weekend playing Ar Tonelico II (whilst listening to old instalments of AWO, admittly).

And, good lord, the English versioning on that game is even worse than I’d imagined. I’d heard about the whole Raki crash-bug thing (indeed, that’s where I left the game last night – I’ve not been pro-active enough in my IPD collection thus far to waste her quickly enough to proceed), but the text is truly horrific. I mean, there’s a frequently recurring line of dialogue that’s been left completely untranslated. I have no idea how anyone could possibly have missed that, but even then, an unreasonably large amount of the dialogue that made it into the game is in broken English anyway.

But that’s kind of old news, I guess. The Os fuelled brouhaha about fandom burnout, “moving on” and the like seems like old news as well, really. Not so much that it all occurred last week, rather that it’s one of those topics that crops up cyclically. I’m sure it’s brethren “This season sucks!” will come along in short order as well, though I think we may well skip “Anime-blog Saturation” this year.

I suppose the posts about the attitude of those who’ve stopped following the stuff is somewhat new, even if it mostly ends up going to the same place. Nothing against Hung here, mind – I remember Hung. Nice guy. I appeared on some podcast thing he used to do a couple of times and probably said some embarrassing things which weren’t entirely true. I seem to remember he wanted someone on with a British accent and got freaked out by my Northern drawl. Fun times.

I think the larger point here is that, I admit, I do tend to get weirded out by statements like the one that Hung made. I think it’s less the fact that he’s stopped watching the stuff (though, after sixteen years in fandom, I find that a curious concept), more the implication of watching anime being such a binary concept – the fact that so many people consider it less a pastime than a hobby, I suppose. It makes me wonder if altogether too many people take this stuff entirely the wrong way, entirely too seriously. The Japanese may want to foster the impression that anime is something you need to get entirely obsessed as a way to promote merchandise sales (something that I’m far from immune to myself), but ultimately, it’s really just another form of entertainment.

Yet a lot of people seem entirely unable to take it that way, and, really, a few years of thinking about nothing but anime the way many of these people do is going to wear on the average person. On my part, whilst I don’t tend to buy much in the way of DVD content which isn’t anime, I do watch an awful lot of US and UK TV. I read a lot of books (and not just light novel translations). I’ve already mentioned that I play a crap-ton of videogames. I have a healthy, balanced entertainment diet, which may well explain my lack of burn-out.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I’ve not got any conclusions or points, and I’m really just writing this post for the sake of posting something, with little thought put into it before hand. I suppose that, without going through the process of losing interest and ceasing to follow anime, it’s not really something I can make any genuine statements about – my interest may ebb and flow, but ultimately I have no experience from which to draw conclusions. Again, it’s really just the fact that casual anime viewers seem to exist in such a minority these days – people either seem to watch far too much of the stuff, or none at all. Although that’s probably a false, internet-born perspective on the matter.

It seems kind of odd for me to be posting something on this subject when I’ve not posted anything here for a fortnight, though. I kind of hate to fall back on something I mentioned with derision earlier in this very post, but honestly, it’s kind of hard to get excited about anime when there’s nothing airing that gets me excited beyond Durarara!, nor is there anything especially worthwhile hitting DVD at the moment. Right now, the thing I’ve actually getting most excited about is remembering that the Patlabor movies exist (thanks AWO!). I ordered the hell out of those, and I’m really freaking excited to watch the first movie again for the first time in about ten years.

I have to admit, though, I fully intend to buy less anime this year. I’ve been acquiring above my rate of consumption for some time now – I’ve still got Geneon releases lying around in shrink-wrap – and I’m in desperate need to rebalancing.

Or at least Japan’s animators seem to love Gerry Anderson. I mean, that surely is Thunderbird 2 that Imo-chan is riding upon there. Not that this is the only blatant Thunderbirds reference in anime, of course, rather it’s just the one which is sitting most recently in my mind. Here’s Thunderbird 2 in Otaku no Video, for another example.

See it up there on the bookcase? Good.

Then there was Technovoyager, the show which was so much like Thunderbirds that they localised it as Thunderbirds 2086. What I’m actually intending to write about here, though, is what happened back at the beginning of the 80’s, when a Japanese production group (including Go Negai, of all people) decided that it’s sure be a neat idea to do their own their own marionette show. which resulted in X-Bomber.

Which promptly, by all accounts, kind of bombed in Japan. It’s probably safe to assume it did regardless of any accounts, though – it’s not like Japanese animation history is exactly saturated with puppet shows. It did, however, end up getting versioned for UK TV under the title Star Fleet, where it ended up gaining a lot of fans – most bizarrely Queen guitarist Brian May, who somehow managed to convince Eddie Van Halen to play on a cover version of the shows ending theme.
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Far be it from me to write a “me-too” post, but here I am writing what essentially amounts to a “me-too” post. Of course, the reason I’m actually writing this is because I’ve yet to get around to making my other series of bandwagon-hopping wafflefests (those being the posts where I talk about some anime which just happened to come into existence between the years of 2000 and 2009). This is largely because I’ve been plowing time into playing through Mass Effect in preparation for the sequel at the end of the month. This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with anime, but it does mean that I’m feeling rather more inclined to do the post which doesn’t actually involve me having to watch anything, as opposed to the one which requires a certain amount of effort. I can only imagine that’s why others have been doing much the same, though at least I’m not going to post to that same synopsis image that most of these posts are.

Usual disclaimers apply here – as JP mentions, Winter has a tendency to suck, and as Aroduc always states, this is really nothing more that idle chatter that restates my genre preferences. The third disclaimer here is that, now that I’ve linked to JP and Aroduc’s summaries, you may as well just skip the rest of the post and read theirs again instead.

With the preamble out the way, let’s get things started.
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It’s another month, which means the arrival of another ludicrously monikered instalment of Haruhi to make me squint in an attempt to correctly read off it’s annoying string of numbers. It’s Endless Eight again, of course, meaning that there’s really little point in saying anything at all about the content (even the extras are, once again, just continuations of the previous volumes) beyond mentioning that it’s the final instalment of that particular run of episodes. Presumably that means that next months (or this months, if you live in one of those parts of the world where it’s ticked over into 2010 already) will, aside from containing the first instalment of Sighs, see the end of Yuki’s dominance of the front-cover space.

But it’s not as if discussing the content is really the point behind these posts. Rather, it’s all about the eternal struggle of Man versus Kadokawa. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?
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Funny thing I noticed when watching through this volume this morning – most of the “money shots”, as it were, in this final instalment of Sora Kake Girl were shots of Nami looking insane. Sure, there’s a few shots of Tsutsuji face-palming and a few decent shots of Kagura, but overwhelmingly the screencaps I ended up taking were of Nami. I guess the girls just photogenic – if nothing else, her end-game costume is rather more striking and complex than most of the rest of the casts.

Which is why I deliberately started this post with an image where she’s completely absent.
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Seasonal Greetings, I guess, although I’m rather a day early. Well, a mite under six hours early by UK time, but I’m not really inclined to sit up particularly late tonight, and posting is likely to slip my mind in the morning.

It would seem I’m devoid of anything else to say, however. Oh, well ^^;

You know, when I said “I’m not entirely convinced that Akari isn’t just some amnesiac girl they just random picked up at some point” a short while back, I thought I was just making a grammatical error I really shouldn’t have (It’s “Randomly”, Mr. Kerot).

Whoops. Turns out I’m correct. I’m really not sure if I should be terrified about being on the same wavelength as the creators of Miracle Train or not…

Oh, well – at least I had absolutely no inkling of the fact that Akari is, in fact, not a young girl. I guess that means I can, at least, be a little secure in the knowledge that I’m not entirely insane.

No, this isn’t me celebrating my one thousandth year in blogging, but this is, according to my Wordpress dashboard, my thousandth post here. It somehow seems like it should be higher, but who am I to argue with the totalling skills of our computer overlords.

Really, though, this is more of a housekeeping post – I figure I should at least mention my intention to continue to refrain from partaking in the production of some of the more resource demanding content I post here until some point early next year. By that I mean I’m not intending to throw up any comics, and this isn’t one of those occasions where that means I’ll throw up something else of a time-consuming nature all of a sudden at some point – I’ve got nothing going on right now.

Honestly, I’m kind of enjoying actually watching anime at the moment. I don’t just mean that, freed of certain time consumers, I’m finding myself able to get through much more content – though that it certainly true. Rather, I’m not watching everything with an eye to making fun of it, and instead can just enjoy shows for what they are. Admittedly, this isn’t entirely a good thing – I mean, I watched the second half of Blood+ a couple of weeks ago, and god damn the production values get really, really lousy towards the end – but it’s mostly been a nice thing.

But, it also means that my viewing isn’t being skewed towards what I think would make good comic content – I’ve been ignoring my backlog for too long in an attempt to keep things to fresher shows, and I’d been steering away from anything which looked a little too serious and anything so stupid that it’s kind of pointless to poke fun at it.

So, yeah, I guess I’ll be starting the seventh series of Meme Comics sometime in January. Look forward to it! Maybe.

Not much else to write about, really. I got around to watching Clannad After Story. I kind of thought some of the earlier episodes were kind of crappy. A lot of that’s definitely Key fatigue, I think – there’s way too much retreading from their other works. I also thought the ending was kind of BS, but whatever. The reason I’m mentioning it here rather than writing about it in a longer post is simply because I don’t feel strongly enough about it to actually throw some words on the subject together.

I also got my copy of the first Spice and Wolf novel a couple of days ago, and whilst I know it’s been talked about at length, I really must reiterate just how terrible that cover is. Otherwise, nothing else to say about that right now – I’ve not actually seen the anime version yet, so it’s all fresh to me. It’s probably better that way, I guess.