It’s nice to see that more people are watching Shingu now that it’s nice and cheap. Of course, I myself waited for the thin-pack before giving it a look, so I can’t really act all smug about it, but it’s nice to see a show which generally generates comments like “WTF is Shingu?!” getting some recognition rather than just becoming another of those post-VHS, pre-digisub shows which disappear into a fog of disinterest.

Anyway, my main reason for posting is that, well, certain bloggers have comments disabled. Really, I kind of understand why he’d want to remain anonymous, but disabling comments? Sure, it results in people like me who want to comment having to write entries on their own blogs, which in turn probably gives him a traffic increase, but without those readers being able to directly comment I’m not sure what the advantage of that is.

But, to get to the points which I actually wanted to comment on:

1) The OP.

Go watch it yourself. Really, it’s just tedious. Admittedly, much of the show itself is pretty placid, but the OP itself is a notch or two slower than that. Given so much of the show essentially revolves around the mundane being far more interesting than abnormality, I don’t really expect epic space battles and explosions, but at the same time I don’t really expect to spend twenty seconds staring at empty sky. If nothing else, it’d have been nice to see some of the actual characters other than Muryou and Hajime. I guess DVD players do at least have chapter skip for these things (just a shame it doesn’t work with the ED).

Ultimately, part of an OPs job is to make people interested in the show, and given that Shingus bores me to tears, I have to say it fails in that regard.

2) “Nayuta is not a Tsundere”.

In my previous post on the show I called Nayuta a “typically twin-tailed tsunderekko”.

In the classic sense of the term, she isn’t. As those who follow Lucky Star have probably have had reiterated to them recently, that originally a tsunderekko was a character who started abrasive but ultimately turned all mushy, usually with a fairly clear defining point marking the change. By that definition, Nayuta certainly isn’t tsundere.

Of course, the term has evolved to encompass characters who are internally deredere even if they are, more often than not, are externally tsuntsun. By that definition, I certainly would class Nayuta as being a tsunderekko. I don’t really see how being “proud and shy and traumatized” excludes her from being tsundere – it simply explains why she is tsuntsun. Heck, being Proud is pretty much a defining element of most tsundere characters.

Sure, its a stereotype, but, in the end, so is the fact that she wears her hair in twin-tails whilst carrying an oft-combative attitude. Tsundere is just a useful term for getting the general gist of a character across without having to type a lot, and given it’s about as general as describing a manga as being “shonen” I don’t really see a problem with levelling it at Nayuta.

3) Aoi Yori Aoshi
You know, I didn’t even enjoy those opening episodes. I sat through the whole original series, simply because I bought it in one go, but Aoi fucking terrifies me. If she were male, or maybe just ugly, she’d probably be flagged as a stalker. In any case, her frightening devotion to someone she’d previously met once (I think?) utterly scares me. The same goes for characters like Midori in Midori no Hibi, by the way – I just don’t see the appeal in that kind of character.

Frankly, in AYA, I was kind of glad to have the harem distracting from Aoi.