Just when I didn’t think I’d find time nor reason to make a post today, I was saved by the most unreliable of features. I’d been watching some El-Hazard this morning (which was prompted by slightly more than my current inclination to watch old anime, but that’s a subject for another post at some point) when I was suddenly stricken with an urge to go see Hellboy II (Not bad – probably the second best movie I’ve seen this year behind Speed Racer, but I’ve not been to see much this year). On arrival home afterwards, I found a couple of boxes had arrived, so after checking to see if Author had made a post about MariMite as he suggested he was about to, I ended up delving into those rather than returning to 90s OAV goodness. From the new arrivals, there’s not much to say about Black Lagoon other than it been awesome, despite it being one of the first of Geneons titles to hit from the Funimation deal (largely because the disks have clearly been sitting around in a storage facility for the last year). I’m undecided as to whether its worth saying anything about the new Negima OAV (sorry, OAD). I did get the last volume of Simoun, which Jeff has been writing about again, but I’ve not yet cracked open the first disk of the show. That’s a project for the upcoming weekend, I guess.

So I, errr, ended up watching the last volume of Kujibiki Unbalance – the TV version, rather than the old OAVs, of course. I get the feeling I’m repeating myself here, but whilst the show clearly isn’t the greatest thing in the history of anime (and I probably wouldn’t have bothered ever seeing it if I hadn’t wanted Genshiken), it’s got a really bad rep that it really doesn’t deserve. I suspect it’s mostly a result of the first episode having repulsed people by neither being the show people wanted or expected coming out of the old OAVs, eschewing the over-the-top parody of shonen and harem series tropes in favour of something, if no less of a parody, then rather more sedate. Having gone in aware of the fact, I found the whole thing pretty enjoyable. Not great, not really worth making any huge effort to track down, but certainly not something I regret sinking any time into. There’s other, similar shows with far bigger fanbases which are certainly worse, at the very least, but I’m not going to pretend to understand how anime fandom works.

Oh, and if you hadn’t realised, it’s actually the same box as appears ontop of the fridge in the Genshiken clubroom.